The Office of Multifamily Housing at HUD is an active player in Opening Doors, the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness, developed in 2010 and amended in 2015. The Plan provides a framework for federal agencies and state and local partners to work together to meet specific goals to end homelessness.
In July 2013, HUD issued Notice H 2013-21 “Implementation and approval of owner-adopted admissions preferences for individuals or families experiencing homelessness.” The Department has now created a step-by-step toolkit to facilitate community involvement and successful implementation of the homeless preference.
View the Opening Doors Through Multifamily Housing: Toolkit for Implementing a Homeless Preference.
The toolkit draws on the experiences of 10 communities that HUD funded to pilot its 2012 initiative called Dedicating Opportunities to End Homelessness (DOEH) – part of HUD’s Opening Doors initiative.
This guide provides detailed discussion and direction through the following parts of an effective process:
- Creating a multifamily planning and implementation team
- Examining and understanding the community’s needs and available multifamily housing resources
- Identifying and engaging service providers
- Engaging multifamily property owners
- Formalizing agreements between service providers and owners
- Supporting owners’ implementation of the homeless preference
- Refining the process
Opening Doors relies upon building and maintaining a community-wide effort to appropriately address and end homelessness. Owners and their management companies will work with local partners to both implement their property’s homeless preference and contribute towards ending homelessness in their communities.
