Housing, Urban Development and Zoning - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us for our 2025 consolidated annual performance and evaluation report public hearing. Today is March 25th, 2026. My name is Rashanda Alexander and I am a proud team member of the community development administration here with the city of St. Louis. In the room today, we have our executive director, Mr. Matt Mo, and we also have our public information officer, Tom Nagel. With that, we will get started. The Community Development Administration serves as the clearing house for federal, state, and local funds. We deploy economic justice by supporting a wide range of public and private activities and public services, empowering communities, um, housing and in general there are three pillars that CDA stands on in tandem with our partners that those pillars are to empower, develop, and transform the the city of St. Louis.

The Community Development Administration was originally founded in 1974 to administer HUD funds by way of the Housing and Community Development Act. By 1980, um it was about 3.7 billion. So, I just want to put this into context. If you would base this out of inflation, the money that we currently received in 1980 would be 14 billion today. So, this program has been severely underfunded. Um, but index to inflation, you you could really see what a tremendous difference we we could make. Um there was a HUD intervention in 2012 where HUD requested that CDA redesign its processes to reduce automatic influence and hence who we are today as an organization for our 2025 caper. Our purpose today is to get your input about our activities from last year. We're going to give you an overview of our entitlement programs and then we're going to touch on each of them. CDBG, home, home arc, ESG, and HOA, letting you know what each program did last year. In doing so, we drafted the caper and made it available on the 11th of this month, and it's still there on our website listed here. We advertised in the St. Louis American on February the 26th. And the purpose of this hearing is to just give you an overview of those accomplishments of the city's four formula grants and to give you an opportunity to comment on this report. It will be due to HUD by March 31st. So, please give us your

comments about what you think and we will include those in the caper. The process for our entitlement programs looks like this. We submit our consolidated plan. We submitted our consolidated plan to HUD in 2019. Then we had a public hearing on August the 2nd. I think we need next slide. Excuse me. For some reason, mine is not doing that. Thank you, Tommy. We had our CDBG RFP um on August through September and then we had appropriations by way of ordinance 71929. Our action plan was submitted on the 15th of November in 2024 and then we entered into a grant agreement with HUD for fiscal year 25 with our submission date as we discussed on the 31st of this month. the four entitlement programs CDBG home ESG and HOA and we're including home art because that is a new funding source that we were awarded have varying degrees of requirements CDBG the basic tenants are to benefit persons of low and moderate income the elimination of slum and blight and urgent need home funds may be used to provide housing to benefits of low and moderate income And then home ARP. These funds are specifically for this requisite population. They are homeless, at risk of homelessness, fleeing or attempting to flee, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assaults, stalking, and human trafficking. And

then other populations at risk um are requiring services and assistance to prevent homelessness. Our ESG formula grant provides homeless persons with basic shelter and essential support services, permanent housing and short-term homeless preventions. And we have our Hawqua formula grant which provides funding for persons housing funding for persons living with HIV and AIDS and their family. An estimated funding um based on prior years of 18.2 million where our actual funding related to CDBG was 17.6 Six. Using prior year's funds in 2025, we have over $19.5 million in expenditures for CDBG. We had CV, which are corona virus funds related to CDBG that were still remaining. And in 2025, we spent over 4 million in CDBG CV funds. In home funds, expenditures are 2.5 million for home arc. These dollars are related to planning and administration as this funding source is new and activities are just beginning of $152,19. ESG expenditures of 1.4 million, HOPA expenditures at 3.5 million, and our choice grant has officially closed out and we are wrapping that up. submitting final expenditures to our HUD portal and our

CNI portal. And in 2025, those were over $4.5 million. These funds assist across the racial population. We had a total of 4,119 people that benefited from this fund this past year of 2025.5 over 3.5 million were subscribed to public services. 3 million for low and moderate homeowner assistance close to 2.1 in housing production. 1.3 in interim assistance, 1.18 in economic development, 1.6 in public improvements, and a million over a million in rehab administration. Our total budget for our planning and administration across city departments was roughly $3.6 million for a total of 18.28 to a over fiscal year 25. So, let's zoom right into public services. We fund youth services, senior services, food access, and this is one of my favorite parts of our public hearings because this is where we get to highlight our partners who are really doing the work because CDA, we fund the funders. We fund your funders. So, we want I wish these names could just pop off the screen because they do such great work in youth services. We have Jean Slay, we have Big Brothers Big Sisters and Mission St. Louis who together provided almost,00 um low moderate income youth with after school and summer school and case

management services, senior services provided by um the St. Louis Agency of Aging of Guardian Angel Settlement. They provided meals and transit and recreation and other services to 640 seniors and their food access seed St. Louis, North Side Youth and Senior Service Center, Corander Community Betterment Foundation, City Seniors, Food Outreach, Guardian Angel Settlement. They provided food pantry services to over 2400 low moderate income city residences. In workforce development, our partners at St. Patrick Center and the Urban League, Employment Connection, St. Louis Youth Jobs, Boys and Girls Club of Greater St. Louis, um, and Mission St. Louis. They provided job training to almost 400 city residents. This is including 156 successful job placements. And in homeless services, Covenant House, Hope House, and Doorways, they provided transitional and permanent supportive housing to 240 residents, including 17 homeless youth. In neighborhood beautifification, Operation Bright Side conducted 259 cleanup beautifification events and over 2400 graffiti removals. We had child care partners with guardian angel settlement that provided child care services for 115 children and parent education for 194 residences, supportive services with St. Patrick's Center. They provided counseling and substance abuse and

mental and behavioral health services for 189 LMI residents. And then those residents at risk um for um that needed assistance that were at risk renters, those services were provided by Tower Grove to over to 48 at risk renters. In our public improvements, Habitat for Humanity awarded $295,000 to the near north side walkable communities phase three. And then we had our St. Louis Housing Authority that awarded $750,000 to the Al Chappelle Community Center, including North Side Youth and Services. They were awarded $249,888 toward their intergenerational community center. We provided home repair services and housing production. Mission St. Louis, for example, provided over 1,800 major home repairs to 209 LMI homeowners. Harambe and Mission St. Louis and Habitat for Humanity combined. They had crews that provided 210 minor home repair services. Our building division provided some lead remediation to 80 units. And in our housing production, 15 affordable for sale homes were completed in 2025. And CDA currently has over $51 million across CDBG home ARP and ARPA funds that are already committed to projects. So just look for these projects in the future years. They include 121 for sale homes,

almost 1,400 rental units, and these projects represent over $581 million in total development across the city. Our homeownership assistance partner at housing partnership provided 17 down payment assistance grants. And then SLDC under their neighborhood commercial district and facade program had one remaining business and they were funded and we look forward to its completion. That program is concluding, but it is um being taken up in our office as a pilot program so we can see if we can continue to move this forward. Our partner Justine Peterson issued 110 microloans to help small businesses grow. All of these things happened in 2025. And so these are the types of things we want to share with you in our evaluation report. home ARP. Earlier in our presentation, we talked about the expenditure of $152,19 and that was for admin and planning. And that's because we received an allocation of over $10.6 6 million to help the atrisisk population across these varying categories of supportive services, rental assistance, development of affordable rental housing units and then of course admin and planning. Next formula grant is emergency services grant. This is administered by the Department of Human Services and their homeless service division. In 2005, the awarded amount to ESG was 1.5

million and change. The service types that ESG provides are emergency shelter, street outreach, prevention, rapid rehousing, and then data collection for the population. They served 2,461 individuals in 2025 and provided funding to these partners to Americanore to Covenant House of Missouri to Gateway 180. They provided funding to Magdala Foundation to Our Ladies in Peter and Paul Community Services, St. Martha's Hall, St. Patrick's Center, and inclement weather with Centinary. The rapid rehousing over 80 households were able to benefit from rapid rehousing in 2024 and prevention. A total of 165 In total, all persons served with ESG funds uh in 2025 or one 2 excuse me 76 persons. This shows just a demographic snapshot of the type of and ages of people that are are served and were served in 2025. And they said to note that especially in 2026, the following is coming. More prevention, outreach, rapid rehousing,

emergency shelter, data collection, and affordable housing. Next up is HOPA. It's our funding source that serves our population of low-income persons living with HIV and AIDS and helping them obtain housing and other supportive services. In 2025, the program provided funding at $3,513,111 for tenant based rental assistance, facilities based housing, short-term rental mortgage and utility assistance, supportive services and case management, housing information services, and permanent housing placement. Who are um our HOPA recipients? They are um of course we stated people who are living with HIV and AIDS, but our partners at Doorways and Peter and Paul Community Services. They use these funds to provide these services. Doorways is an interface nonprofit organization and Peter and Paul provides housing and supportive services to those who are homeless, especially those who experience mental illness and live with HIV and AIDS. The goal they exceeded in 2025. The goal was 755 people to be served and the actual goal was 818. So, congratulations to Hapla um team for the great work that they're doing. We um have concluded giving you a barrage of information and reporting over the fiscal year 25 and want to hear from you. You can do so now if you are um

online by way of the chat. You can also email us and we will include any of your public comments in the caper that we submit to HUD. We also had two part participants who who came in um to our public hearing um but they have since left but we did want to acknowledge those two members from the community who came in for our public hearing today. So Tom, do we have any questions in the comment in the chat? No, not yet. But uh for anyone attending online, you can put questions or comments in the chat and those will be recorded and answered here. You can also raise your hand um and we'll try and bring you on live. Uh we have a kind of imperfect uh audio system here, but uh if you want to write in the chat, that'll probably be the most convenient way. Um, you can also send questions and comments to cdbgstwmo.gov go

earlier and saw did not was not able to see who all were on the um on with us and Amy Bickford leads up the work at ESG. She is on with us. Amy, did you want to add anything to what we shared? I can definitely go back to your slides or are you good? Nope. You did great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for the work that you do.

No problem. Thank you for the work you do. Okay. We see no hands raised um or questions in the chat. I think we can go ahead and thank everyone for joining uh online or in person. And just a reminder, if you're here, you're pro probably already subscribed to CDA's e newswsletter. Uh but that doesn't mean you can't copy and paste your friends and colleagues email addresses and go to the city's website stwmo.gov/cda. /CDA and subscribe your co-workers and friends to our newsletter. That's the best way to get updates about CDA, especially on uh new funding cycles, um program rollouts, etc. So, make sure you're in the loop and in the know with CDA's e newsletter. Thank you, Tom, for um that great plug. We look forward to more um in the future, more people signing up. Have a great day, you guys. Thanks for your attendance and attention today.

And thank you STL TV as always for your IT support and facilitating this meeting. And STL TV, we can go ahead and uh close this meeting. Thank you so much for your help.