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alright it looks like we have a critical mass so we'll go ahead and kick things off welcome everyone to today's webinar try to financing clean energy in affordable housing through green banks today we'll be looking at the Connecticut Green Bank approaches my name is Bettina burgoo and with the center for market innovation at the Natural Resources Defense Council which is a US base but internationally acting investment or organization and along with our partners at the Coalition for green capital we coordinate the Green Bank Network which is the host of this webinar I just a bit about the Green Bank Network it was founded last year with the aim of increasing knowledge exchange among its Green Bank founding members which includes the Connecticut Green Bank as well as with other actors in the green finance sector it does have a website where you can check out our knowledge center that has green banking resources and we also have a periodic newsletter that you can subscribe to and our website is on your screen there and you can also follow us on Twitter at Green Bank Network so today on this webinar we're going to hear from Connecticut Green Bank experts on why since its inception in 2011 it's gotten increasingly involved in providing education financing technical assistance and other resources that address barriers to deployment of clean energy projects in affordable housing properties and it's very timely because in March the Connecticut Green Bank welcome to pet seat from a veteran professional and affordable housing development and finance and generally everything having to do with affordable housing to their board of directors so now is definitely the right time to hear from Connecticut Green Bank at the staff and the board level about what they're doing and what they're thinking about for the future so we have three exciting presenters today they are Carrie O'Neil she's the vice president of residential programs at Connecticut Green Bank we have Kim Stevenson the Associate Director for multifamily housing at Connecticut Green Bank and as I mentioned we have Betsey Crum who is executive director of the Women's Institute for Housing and Economic Development why head in Connecticut and is also a newly appointed member of the Connecticut Green Bank Board of Directors I did want to mention that unfortunately Betsy has developed a sinus infection and has bronchitis so she is going to try to speak as loudly as possible but maybe just not so much and we're just so happy that she's still willing to be on with us to give her a really unique perspective so finally I wanted to just mention a couple housekeeping things please do submit your written questions throughout the webinar by typing your questions into the little question box that we have on the screen there we are going to pause midway through the presentation and take a couple questions that have come in already and then we'll have another longer question and answer at the end we are going to be recording this webinar and so that recording will be posted on the Green Bank Network website as well as on the Connecticut Green Bank website and on the Green Bank Network website you can also see our past webinars so I'm now going to hand it off to Carrie Thank You Carrie thank you between us and throughout and myself and Tim will be and after university to weigh in on the presentation and I just want to thank NRDC and the Green Bank Network for inviting us to talk about our approaches to the affordable housing market and how we can deploy more clean energy and affordable housing it's a very challenging market and but a very gratifying market and I don't think we have all the answers but we're happy to share where we are so far and and what we've learned to date and go to the next slide and just a little bit of background on the Connecticut Green Bank we are the nation's and first Green Bank and we have currently a balance sheet of about 120 million dollars in assets as Bettina mentioned we were formed in 2011 and we just cost about the billion and a couple months ago the billion dollar in investment in Connecticut clean energy economy milestone and which is a big milestone for us we're very proud of that and and one of the things that we're very proud of is through the culmination of the board supporting our work and low to moderate-income efforts for three or four years just last year the Board adopted a fourth organizational goal which you see here on the slide to support affordable and healthy homes and businesses and distressed communities and reducing energy burdens and for businesses and homes in those communities and our low income board member throughout that time Pat rice and really educated us about energy burdens and the challenge of our most vulnerable citizens around energy burdens and when she retired and Betsey Crum joined the board Kim and I were so delighted for to have this advancement in our board to now have someone so steeped in affordable housing and the issues facing affordable housing and so I just wanted to pause there and it gives Betsey maybe an opportunity to comment on the Green Bank and joining the board I'm sure welcome everyone and I'm glad to be here and my first introduction to the Green Bank was in my previous job where I was the executive director of the Connecticut Housing Coalition and in that role I think I felt it was my job as a former developer and an advocate for affordable housing and someone who worked in the finance world to kind of try to play the role of translator or intermediary a bridge among all those entities and we really hadn't done frankly a very good job in Connecticut at in terms of bringing green technology and energy improvements into our various housing programs and into we're one of the few states in the country that has state financed public housing and we've done a terrible job actually of bringing green technology into that most of our public housing was developed during the 70s and 80s and had a lot of old electric heating and and all kinds of you know messy inefficient technology so there was a it was a great opportunity when I met when I came when I came to know the Green Bank to see if there was a way we could get there and their financing more into our development GLS it seems a little insurmountable but I think you'll hear as we go forward how we kind of cracked that nut thanks Betsy and next slide so I thought we'd start I'm really high level with a case study to ground us and what we think of is the opportunity when we think about energy upgrades in multifamily affordable multi-family this is if you have an opportunity click on the link there's a wonderful video that does a much better job telling the stories and then I can do it's really a wonderful wonderful story this is an affordable housing condo association that serves residents that are at sixty percent of area median income or lower of 82 units and they had gone to numerous financial institutions and had been turned down and came to us and our CDFI partner capital for change this is really a story of where the energy savings can unlock not only the ability to pay for energy upgrades but other things as well this property needed a new roof it needed lighting it needed employers and insulation and with a combination of utility incentives which by the way weren't even as rich as we see as meant in many many other deals and the financing the the estimated annual savings for the energy were so strong that they they more than covered the debt service and allowed more to be financed including these necessary repairs around the roof and lighting and so health and safety and one of the great stories that came out of this was that the overall improvements actually bumped them into a better insurance category something we hadn't even thought about as an additional benefit that could come out of these sorts of things and so we just wanted to ground folks and sort of the opportunity right away and better you have a great way of characterizing me sort of feels yeah so so when I heard about this scenario as a developer I was just like oh my god there's this is found money if I'm a property manager and I'm you know trying to to juggle the million things that need to be done with my annual operating income things like a roof new boilers and that sort of thing can almost really never get done you have to borrow for their finds you some way to get a grant you know affordable housing doesn't really have the ability to typically to go and raise the rent to cover the improvements that are needed and it operates in a very slim margin so when I saw this it was this is underwriting based on the estimated annual savings from the utility improvements that in addition to doing the utilities which probably would not have been my number one priority as a property owner it lets me do my roof replacement which would have been my number one priority as a property owner and so the aha moment I had on this was that this was sour ones money for my project it was not just the energy improvements but generated enough capital through this loan that I was able to do everything I needed to have done in my property so this was like new money sound money so you see why we love the best examiner force because you've given us a whole new language somebody in and describing our work and next slide please so again at a very very high level I just wanted to ground folks in terms of what we've done so far and then we'll talk about how we could look at the market and how we did it and we have a benchmarking program that is benchmarked almost 1100 buildings more than 19,000 units we have a pre development loan program that has closed 24 loans so far and then we've got various term loan financing available but you'll hear later where this is really not our focus and what we've done so far all tells us discovers on the pre demand term side about 3,800 units next slide and it just in terms of how we look at the market first and you could click forward once more Betina just in terms of how we look at the market in terms of income and we just lost our screen here see if I can get it back in terms of income we we look at AMI area median income band I'm sorry one second if I can get my screen back and we look at area median income bands and in terms of our definitions and we're looking at and we defined low income as 80% of area median income or lower and we're looking at moderate income is 81 to 100% of area median income or lower so these are important every organization has different definitions this is what the Green Bank chose in terms of discussing with lots of different folks and when we set our income limits we also set them in coordination with the Department of Housing and the State Housing Finance Authority and and they are basing their income limits off the HUD limit so we very intentionally aligned ourselves with the housing world for income limits as opposed to the energy world because we felt it was important to be able to integrate ourselves into the housing affordable housing capital stacks and programs and we also look at and we do a lot of data visualization about where our low-income residents with and paintings of that nature if you go to the next slide and in terms of just looking at the multifamily housing stock and we've charted out you know whether it's the five nine ten to nineteen twenty to forty nine to federate cetera and what part of the market or how much of the market each care drys about half of the multifamily units serve low-income households about 90,000 of these units are assisted or rent restricted units the remainder are naturally occurring affordable housing units our Housing Finance Authority finance is about 40,000 of these units and the remainder have assistance from Department of Housing our HUD and a big chunk of our larger multifamily buildings are concentrated in about 30 or 40 municipalities but but really about 50% or half are in five core cities and where many of these have a high concentration of HUD properties so we've really really done a lot of studying on where and the nature of these sorts of properties next slide and then just last wrapping up an investor speci I'll ask you to comment overall on the Margay and while our housing stock is not just about energy many many many other issues a lot of health and safety issues whether it's knob and tube wiring or mold and water leak asbestos lead paint you know other things of that nature we have decades of deferred maintenance that are at play here and especially with our smaller multifamily properties you we we see you know owners are stretched and strapped and challenged to deal with to deal with these issues because they are so complex our larger properties are dealing with it's - that they tend to have a little bit more sophistication and capability for contending with this and if they can time the financing so let me let me just stop there and that was a lot to go through in terms of how we think of the market affecting any comment yeah I'll just um I'll just add a couple couple thoughts I think in the previous slide you kind of laid out very clearly where the the size falls out and I think it's probably it follows generally that about half of I'd say about half of the affordable what we would consider affordable to the people below 80% ami range in Connecticut on half of it is publicly financed in one way or another either through HUD or our if state Department of Housing or Connecticut has in finance Authority or in some combination of of that financing and so I think we saw that as a good logical hook because to to reach folks because of our relationships or my relationships when I started working with the Green Bank with those agencies and of course they have developed those relationships the other the sort of natural what we think of as naturally occurring are the more the mom-and-pop kind of operation when Connecticut is a an older city in the United States so we have a lot of housing stock that was built even in the 18 you know in the 19th and early 20th century and especially in our in our course inner city's affordability is difficult in Connecticut to just in terms of the market because we have a shortage of you know the national Low Income Housing Coalition has looked at the housing need in the state and we fall short by some estimates of about eighty thousand units in order to get the supply and demand really to work well in Connecticut so while we have an aging housing stock it's still in very high demand and so affordability is challenging so I think again the more that we look and Kerry mentioned looking at the capital stack and trying to keep the financing such that it can work and affordable housing is very challenging because these properties tend to not generate a lot of income because it's the rents the ability of the tenants to pay is very limited so if it gets into a whole new sphere I think from what the green banks traditional lending has been that's absolutely true next slide and just moving on to how we think about energy burdens and we do think about energy burdens a lot when we're designing programs we and operations people in the state does an energy affordability gap study every year and it has in the last couple of years flung quite a bit with the price of oil and gas but but suffice it to say even when the price of oil and gas has gone down a lot the gap is still significant and this gap is basically the gap of you what energy costs are for low income households above what's considered an acceptable energy burden of six percent of income if you go to the next slide and Department of in apartment of energy is provided a handful of states in the low-income clean energy accelerator a really interesting tool and so I've just shown you around the dotted line for renters at different area median income bands with little bars give you a sense of the dollars that are being spent on average for households for energy and it's quite interesting the dollars don't move that much it's pretty consistent but the incomes and the orange bars give you a percent of energy burden and but the incomes are very different and I provided on the lower right hand corner how drastically different the incomes are in a state like
Connecticut that's pretty unequal and so the energy burden is very very significant for our lower-income residents and this was really where we're trying to move the needle next slide and before I turn it over to Kim and I just wanted to leave you with two additional case studies to kind of ground your thinking as Tim starts to go into the approaches and when we think about unlocking cash flows it's not only to do these energy upgrades and an unlock cash flow to do additional improvement but it's also to stabilize properties and make sure that these properties don't you know following to such financial ruin that they end up being bought out by a developer and they become market rates with the preservation of affordable housing as well these are examples of coops that are very in development meaning we've been working with them for a long time trying to get them into pre development and before we even get them into project development there they're seeing exorbitant energy costs and these energy costs are literally putting these properties in the red perilously close to financial ruin if not kind of already there and yet the energy saving is financed through these strategies that we're talking about can unlock the cash flows to not only pay for the upgrades for the energy work get the utilities and centers in there to pay for additional health and safety upgrades that are needed but they can also put these properties in the black and that's what we're trying to do so with that let me okay I just need let me just add quickly to that as part of the market in Haven in Bridgeport are two of our oldest cities and two of the areas that have historically had the biggest concentrations of low-income residents they are also - currently - the hottest cities in terms of market their heat they're both on the rail line to New York City and have become there are huge pressures and so these two cooperatives which are resident run affordable housing kind of an older model really are at risk of being lost - to the market and so I think it's it's important and think if to those care about affordable housing to think about so these two that were built so long ago being really at risk of being lost as affordable housing as much because of their energy costs as any other reason so it really does become a huge preservation great will be now yeah yeah yeah yeah I was going to just jump in here and we have a question that's in thanks for especially for grounding us in the case studies and the statistics this is a complicated issue so the question is for we have a huge variety of people on the line today including maybe people who are working for local governments that are thinking about launching their own green finance institution or Green Bank so for those green banks that might be just starting out what would be the important steps to start engaging with the affordable housing sector I'm especially affordable housing lenders to to get a multi-family housing program underway so I feel like we should hope we should maybe hold that thought until we have Kim go through and see if we should still and if they still want to have that question answered after we have Kim go through the partnership development is that is that too much of a gun absolutely no that's fine you can definitely do that and actually we have the questions that we have are getting a little bit more specific about program development and they're writing about it so why don't we just continue on then and then we can save the time for a longer Q&A and really get into the details okay great okay next slide Kim's going to we're going to have Tim Stevenson go next yeah hi good afternoon everyone really excited about sharing this information with you all and what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about kind of the history of our program development and our partnerships how that evolved and then we'll talk a little bit more about some of the programmatic detail so this slide right here is we're good I'm going to walk you through a timeline of kind of the events that occurred in getting to where we are today in the beginning back in 2012-2013 when we started work we saw significant opportunity in the multifamily market you know for really finding for releasing the cash savings and dis found money that Betsy was talking about but we were just not getting much headway in terms of getting interest from owners or closing deals it's a tough market as many of you know so we began by approaching the factor by surveying the market to identify structural challenges impeding progress as well as identifying who are the key players in this market in Connecticut who are the thought leaders and where were the centers of excellence in terms of driving housing work not just energy work but housing work in Connecticut and where are the low-hanging fruit and opportunities what we identified is the big challenges were that the energy improvement process was just too complex for owners to navigate especially if they're trying to take a holistic approach that looks at multiple measures and and does and goes deeper and looks at the property over its lifetime many owners of affordable housing in Connecticut well they're like they deserve angel halos they're spread thin they've got many competing priorities so it's not something they can take on easily and also they've been burned many times so they don't know who to trust and and others are not motivated to invest in energy improve if the tenants are paying the utility bill as its lieutenants that benefit from the energy savings or at least it's perceived that the tenants benefit from the energy savings and not the owners so the big opportunities that we saw were in master metered properties and that means properties where the owner pays the utility bill and if improvements are made then we can directly take advantage of the cost savings properties where there's potential system failure and the need for system replacement properties that have crushing energy bills and and another sort of big area of opportunity is where you've got motivated owners that are really trying to do the right thing and and want to do this work so go ahead and to the next one another big challenging opportunity area with with the state-sponsored housing portfolio that I think Betsy referred to this a little bit earlier back in the early days we had a new governor who would come on board Governor Malloy had allocated 300 million or 30 million dollars a year over 10 years for badly needed capital improvements to the to the state supported housing capital needs refreshments were done on all of these properties but all but only a few looked at energy and we kind of looked at that input boy there was a huge missing opportunity here and then there wasn't a clear process for getting energy work done early in the design process or energy assessments and energy work looked at early in the design process and what was happening was that utility incentives weren't getting included in the capital stack for financing these projects and when the projects were getting funded ultimately what was happening was that the upfront cost of the energy improvements were getting cost engineered out rather than value engineered in and this was sort of a big area that we really approached in terms of the challenge to address but in partnership the Connecticut Green Bank the Connecticut Housing Finance Agency the utility company and the Department of Housing began talking to each other through regular interagency meetings you can move to on to the next one and you can move to the next one as well and we really began to make headway on this challenge when we worked through a lien process this was a an analysis it was actually funded by our Department of Energy and Environmental Protection they polled they helped pull all the agencies together dealing with housing and this was a process whereby we looked at what is the process what are the inefficiencies in the process what's working what's not and what does an ideal final result look like and this process included all of our housing agencies and other key stakeholders the core team worked together for a week it was probably 50 hours together 10 hours a day where we really really hashed all of this out and what ultimately resulted in this was an expedited process for doing an upfront energy analysis and committing utility incentives into the capital stack through what became a letter of participation by the utility companies and as a result of all this work now every project in the state that receives funding from the Department of Housing or chafa have to go to this energy analysis progress and utility incentives are included in the capital stack so it was really sort of an important important piece of work and going back in time a little bit back in 2014 the Green Bank and the Housing Finance Authority also partnered on a demonstration program whereby the housing authority selected five state-funded properties to take through an energy improvement process that included benchmarking assessments audits design and and then funding I think Chasseur really wanted to ultimately understand and get comfortable with energy underwriting the Green Bank needed projects just to get our hands dirty with because we were in the early days of program development to understand the market and the challenges these properties represented a cross-section of municipal housing authorities and privately owned properties and this demonstration program was the place where we all learned by doing and we got our head it's like wine forward four years later the fifth property we're just about to close on it in the next couple of weeks it sort of been a challenging process it was painful at times but we learned by doing and misinformed all of our current program development and our other programs that we have that we're offering to the market right now then in 2014 we also began conversations with the Housing Coalition where Betsy chrome was the director at the time to explore Housing Coalition support for helping to reach out and educate the market Betsy was certainly thinking about things much more strategically than I was I think at the time we basically saw the coalition as having two things one was the best rolodex in the state to reach out to the market and the respect and trusted the the key stakeholders and with the green bank really being the new kid on the block we had none of this so we were thrilled to partner with the Housing Coalition and then what began as a contract with the Housing Coalition to coordinate and support outreach throughout the they evolved into trainings on best practices in partnership with both the Department of Housing and the Housing Finance Agency and then this year we established a peer-to-peer network of real sort of leading thought leaders and practitioners in in the state go ahead you can advance the conversations resulting from these trainings I think ultimately led chafa and Department of Housing to adding points to the scoring system for the qualified application plan and this is the the highly coveted nine percent tax credit and you know really great leadership on the part of Java and also Department of Housing and making this happen and I think it's it's already shifting the subsidized affordable housing market in Connecticut to greener buildings can I just write a comment yeah where's Erica Kim did as I said as I mentioned earlier the sort of aha moment for existing property owners is when you can generate a source of funds to take care of other problems not just energy problems on the developers for developers of new housing or doing substantial rehab the the big golden key here was creating points in the competitive application rooms so for those of you who are thinking about you know how to get that wedge in your local in your local world created the the holy grail in the way I think is to create incentives to do it not through so much through post construction incentives but to create to monetize those incentives which can mentioned we did it through this pilot and to put points in the rating and ranking system to get because developers will chase the points period end of the story so that those were two really key to really keep things that that made a difference and okay yeah thanks Betsy now to kind of in parallel and threaded through all this work capital for change which is the heart rate based community development finance institution launched the low income multifamily energy loan program and a real key element of this program is that it does energy underwriting on projected energy savings but these are also unsecured loans the Green Bank provides a loan loss reserve we help to capitalize this and this is really seeing really big success in Connecticut with great leadership at capital for change new ecology a nonprofit focused on green and sustainable building also entered Connecticut in 2013 2014 funded by the JPB foundation this work I work with new ecology funded by JP be resulted in a partnership and design of our pre development loan programs the JP be dollars also funded an initial round of energy performance benchmarking that was done by we go wise and has led ultimately to a partnership that we now have with the Housing Finance Agency where we're trying to benchmark 1,500 buildings in Connecticut the JPD Foundation has also similarly funded a solar nonprofit grid alternative to perform toll of feasibility analyses for affordable housing go ahead in advance and then in 2015 the MacArthur Foundation made a five million dollar program related investment in the Green Bank and Mabel enough to fund all of our pre development and term loans that cover both energy related in health and safety measure and they just want to emphasize here for the foundation community and for everyone on the call this foundation funding has been absolutely critical to everything we've done here including the jpv dollars that didn't come to the Green Bank that supported our partners in helping us do our work and catalyze this market and then several months ago we launched the energize Connecticut multi-family initiative this establishes a more integrative process to working with the utility companies and the utility incentives for funding what we call mid cycle properties these are properties that are not at a key financing event they're somewhere good cycle where we need to add that to them to finance the energy improvements and also this process encourages a deeper and more holistic approach and this year we've also received a second program related investment from the Kresge Foundation for solar and storage and I'm going to stop there and go ahead and advance to the next slide so just just slide here it just these are our partners these are all the people that we've worked with and we built relationships with over the last six years the main point here is that it takes all these partners to make the successful foundations agencies community development finance institutions the utility partners and also our outreach partners go ahead to the next slide next slide okay this point here just very quickly these are programs that we offer we offer both pre development resources and term financing you can learn more about these programs at the Green Bank website on the term financing the line loan is an unsecured loan as I mentioned previously we offer solar financing for folks that are looking to do just so we're only off balance sheet financing and gap financing for projects that need that extra push next slide okay a couple words on this slide right here this is kind of how we think about the market in very simplistic terms in terms of housing that serves the low and moderate income sector you have subsidized rent restricted housing and you sort of opposite to that you have the non subsidized non-restricted but sort of naturally occurring affordable housing and and how those projects are financed in the capital stacks and the restrictions on putting existing debt on the project tends to be very different and it's an important consideration and then along the vertical axis you have what we refer to as mid cycle properties these are properties that are not at a major event in the life of t
e property it might be a refinance a sale a major capital improvement they just simply need energy and health and safety improvements that would be funded by utility incentives existing and then an existing debt and then finally properties below below on the axis that are at some kind of major event it's either new new construction of substantial rehab a reef and finance or a sale advance to those yeah yeah so so we've taken a very sort of flexible approach to looking at the market and if we're not needed we just we don't play there so for example / in the subsidized world it's mainly been partnerships and supporting our partners and we found in many cases that the Green Bank debt and Finance and just can't compete with what our housing agency partners called off our so we don't play there in the capital stacks you know alternatively with many of the mid-cycle properties they really need unsecured financing there's existing covenants and debt that make it difficult to add additional debt so our programs really work well with these types of properties so as you're looking to do program design these are some really important considerations so on to the next slide I'm going to skip this slide we talked about a lot of this as well this slide here you can all think this is just sort of summarizes the work and the accomplishments with our partners and just one point to make here is that with all these programs we're starting to see some subsequent applications and repeat developers property owners coming back to us after they've had a good first experience with a go ahead to the next slide so I think in and this is carrier nail in in wrapping up what you can all read the parting thought I think our big takeaway at least for Kim and myself has always been there's no way for us to go it alone in a market like this we really have to figure out who the right partners are and also the right people it's both the right organizations and the right champions and those organizations and sometimes it's just individuals who are those connection points the sacrum was clearly one of those and also on our own team you know we have a diverse set of skill sets within the green Ankou or poundage it's not just came in myself its finance folks its other folks as well and so it's while it's hard work and it's you know financing is probably the least of it it's all the other relationship building and listening really really listening to be as you get to know these other sectors and you know we put the program design at the end and we talked about it at the end really by design and intentionally because and that's how we that's how we did our programs we got out there we tried to understand the market first and then do program design the best being came I don't know if you have any other final thoughts I'll have a couple final thoughts I have coming from my perspective I think those of us in the affordable housing are sort of by nature a little reluctant to get into the green technology the energy incentives because they seem like an extra they seem I think somebody said earlier you know they're not seen as a way to they're seen as a way something you need to value engineer out instead of in because of cost and history and so the first couple of times that can met with me I was just like uh yeah yeah you know and she but she kept she's very persistent and very kind of interested to find out what the barriers were and I think you know as I learned more about the different players to me you know legalized and green energies and Connecticut Green Bank and eversource and energy you know that they were just a jumble of names but I think it was I think there was a real role to them educating me and getting sort of past the reluctance that a lot of affordable housing developers have to stepping into something that seems you know very much like an extra or a nice thing to have and seeing it as something that we really needed to have the the other thing I'll just say that they didn't mention is the first money in peace the pre-development financing I think has potential to be very important and for any developer of affordable housing super competitive and highly leveraged getting that first money in is a critical component and the fact that the Green Bank is willing to be that first money in I think was was another real way to kind of grow and cement themselves in their world I think that's all I have awesome well thank you to Carrie Kim and Betsy to each of you for your insights today and we do have a lot of questions coming in so I don't think we'll get to all of them but I'll certainly forward them on to you along with people's contact information and and hopefully that can confine time to get back to them if we don't address them and also we had a couple questions about whether people can access the slides and yes in addition to the recording of this webinar we will post the slide deck to the Green Bank Network website in the knowledge center so that being said I think since it was brought up earlier we'll go back to the earlier question about if you're just starting out if you're in a jurisdiction you're looking at launching a Green Bank or you have one and you're thinking about launching a multi-family affordable housing program what would be the first steps you know off of your lessons learned that you mentioned to get that get that started and someone else I'm asked the question about larger states you had mentioned that foundation support was critical in Connecticut so how could that work in states that would need a larger green bank than Connecticut you know to let me just do the first one in terms of how do you get started you know really I just go into it and try to figure out what's the market who are the players what are the challenges and then who can we partner with to get projects and really kind of advance this market I mean that was how we started and a lot of the initial starting out was also just relationship based so I was working with a team of consultants that had long-standing relationship in the affordable housing market who were also able to bring the field to the table and were willing to work through everything with us and just like we actually recognized it was so challenging for owners initially that with that demonstration program I talked about we actually paid the owners to participate believe it or not and spend the time to work with us to help figure it out so like really thinking differently about you know how you're doing this work and what you're asking people to do I think the other key thing this is carrie is that you know for Department of Housing and chafa and they had a mission of preserving affordable housing and they had already identified energy costs as a challenge and so we a lot we found common we found points of common interest and then try to you know build from there and so whether that's your local community development financial institutions or local lenders who are who are already financing affordable housing but they can't do it all or seeing deals that are falling out that they can't do that's another potential way into the market the other thing though I would add this especially if you can't tell mine with strained voice vegetable that the pilot piece was I think a really interesting approach that that the Green Bank took and I found at least in the our state and I think it's true many states that presenting something as a demonstration or a pilot presents less risk it kind of gives everyone a little bit of cover and it's also a great way to build those relationships and find out who the real who the real decision-makers are and who your real allies are and it's been very it's been very important in Connecticut we have a long history at a college once to refer to creating pilots are talking about new programming is having a dinner party and she was called a pilot program or demonstration the appetizers sort of a way to get everybody's appetite built for for what's what might come later that's going to be a more a bigger thing so I would suggest that some of the bets of kikis and then as to the second question for larger states and the foundation support so there are two aspects to the foundation support that there are nonprofits and service providers operating in this space who are supported by foundations and and their their mission is to expand into other markets and we've identified many that are kind of in our toolbox and toolkit so approach them your state may be a great candidate often these folks are looking for they want strong commitment and strong partners on the ground so that they can be successful and then in terms of the the direct foundation support in terms of program related in investments that we got from McArthur and from Kresge and those those take a little longer to develop and those are relationship development in and of themselves and those are structured as long-term low-interest loans to the Green Bank or in the case of McArthur it was to the Housing Development Fund in partnership with a Green Bank for particular purposes so you were happy to chat further about that and if and be done it is you know relationship development also great thank you for that and we can like I said pass on contact info for folks who have submitted that question so one hopefully quicker one you mentioned mid-cycle projects for those mid cycle projects how are energy or loans for energy improvements repaid maybe that's to you Kim say that how are they repaid oh there were play they were paid by savings from the cash flow cash flow savings from the from the upgrades rate it is not an envelope that was the intention and big question it's a loan made by a community development finance institution right and they just make regular loan payments back but the under regular mortgages that is operating not a mortgage no it's not an oil mortgage but like it like the mortgage it's repaid out of there operating right when and importantly it's actually the line loan is unsecured then is used to the others huge and is huge and and I know that I hope the capital for change folks are on the line here you know we've been lending they've been lending you know on some project on the order of a million dollars of unsecured debt and it's the only way these projects can get financed Grail each has four other board member because the other mortgage holders wouldn't allow a security realm Yeah right right great thank you for that clarification I think we'll do one more step back and do a closing question here the question is well starting with a statement one challenge that some folks on the line have heard is that there's a challenge for affordable housing owners to navigate the many different programs with different incentives and audits and financing options from utilities to housing lenders etc all these folks in the space mentioned how does Connecticut Green Bank help owners navigate that complexity for you know building owners I just don't have the capacity to wade through that by themselves yeah so we've been working really hard to develop kind of a one-stop shop or a one-stop mall as we kind of refer to it where folks will come to my Selfridge on D'Agostino who manages our pipeline and then we'll learn more about the property in the project and then try to direct folks in the right direction the other thing is that what we've done is with our pre development loan programs we developed what we call the sherpa loan program with new ecology where new ecology operates as an owner's agent and the whole purpose of that program is for an owner to be able to work with a trusted advisor to navigate through all of the steps of the process from the assessments and audits and then if they'd like to real college you can also offer services to take them through the implementation process as well and you can learn more about that on our web page under the Sherpa program great well I think we are at 2 o'clock so we will close up there the last thing I'll mention from our Q&A is that several folks on the line have just said thank you for your leadership on this critical issue and that has been really informative so I just want to echo that and say thank you so much to betsy crumb carrie O'Neil and kim stephenson for joining us on giving the presentation and also to the audience for all of your questions as I mentioned we'll follow up with you if we didn't get to your question you can see the contact information for that the Kari and Kim there on the screen as well as um for the Green Bank Network as I mentioned we will be posting the recording of this webinar by tomorrow and the slides will be on the website as well so on behalf of the Green Bank Network I just want to thank you for joining us today and hope you have a great rest of your day thank you thank you
