LISC Greater Kansas City Advocates for Affordable Housing in Many Ways

A large part of the mission of LISC Greater Kansas City is related to creating and supporting affordable housing initiatives.

As Amanda Wilson, senior program officer, describes it, “We are an intermediary, so we oftentimes don’t do the work on the ground, but support and provide technical assistance and funding and financing to those organizations who are doing the work on the ground, while also supporting their work and our work through policy.”

LISC is heavily involved in the Community Development Corporation network, in which the organization provides grant funds to groups that are working on affordable housing programming. In addition, LISC Greater Kansas City helps with training programs for the CDC network, Wilson said.

LISC works with the CDCs on such things as financial management or strategic planning.

“And for our grants that we do, we work with them to find projects that are aligned both with what they’re doing and what we also want to fund. Most, but not all, of our CDCs in our CDC network do provide affordable housing, whether it’s through rehab or new construction or being asset managers [such as] landlords,” Wilson said.

Another important area is advocating for policy change, which LISC Greater Kansas City undertakes on the local and regional levels, while its parent organization advocates on a national level.

The Promoting Equitable Neighborhoods (PEN) coalition is active in Kansas City, Missouri. PEN has helped compile a voter guide “successfully advocating for funding for the city’s housing trust fund, and we advocated for directing American Rescue Plan dollars that the city was getting, to the city’s housing trust fund, which before that had zero dollars in it,” Wilson said.

Most of LISC’s housing work is focused in Kansas City’s urban cores, on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the city.

“With our Regional Housing Partnership (RHP), we’re able to look at bigger systemic issues of lack of affordable housing across the whole region,” Wilson said.

During its first year or so, the RHP, a partnership between Mid America Regional Council and LISC, has been gathering information and creating a baseline and making assessments around what is happening with housing in the region, said Andrea Generaux, housing and capacity building program officer.

In addition, RHP is identifying potential pilot projects and solutions to those, Generaux said.

While the partnership works in seven key areas, the current focus is on alternative funding structures for home ownership.

“One of the models we’ve chosen is community land trusts, so there is a business plan that was developed around community land trusts and there are five pilot projects throughout the region that are focusing on that,” Generaux said.

In addition, RHP is putting together a community needs assessment, with the help of local developers. Moreover, RHP has a strategy committee made up of representatives from all the areas of the region.

“We have a data hub that not only has information available around housing within the region, but also stories that connect to that data that kind of help tell the story of the people who need housing and what are the concerns around that,” Generaux said.

LISC Greater Kansas City’s affordable housing work falls into “three buckets,” Wilson said.

There’s increasing money for creation and preservation of affordable housing through grants and loans; housing policy and advocacy; and supporting the affordable housing delivery system.

While LISC doesn’t provide direct client services, the organization supports providers of housing for eligible individuals and families, Wilson said.

“We look at our CDC partners and other developers as the delivery system for this, and so we don’t develop housing projects, but others do. So how do we support that ecosystem through money and policy,” she said.