Approved!

Important update

The resolution in support of senior housing cooperatives on City-owned tracts within Austin-area ETODs was approved without objection at the November 21 City Council Meeting. This is a very proud moment for us! We are thrilled and filled with excitement over what this can do for our future and our promise to develop mixed-use, limited-equity cooperative housing for seniors in walkable urban village settings!

Thank Yous

Thank you Planning Commissioners Woods and Maxwell for sponsoring the initial Planning Commission resolution in support of senior housing cooperatives on City-owned tracts within ETODs. And thank you Council Member Harper-Madison, for shepherding it through the Housing & Planning Committee and on to the full Council for approval. Largely through your combined efforts, we and other shared housing groups are now primed for success!

Giving Thanks!

Wishing you and yours a wonderful Thanksgiving on the 28th as the holiday giving and gifting season kicks off! We are grateful for your generous support through the years. Please watch for coming announcements for giving opportunities and donate!

Important updates - City Resolution Support Senior Housing Cooperatives

The date is finally set! The resolution in support of senior housing cooperatives is on the City Council’s November 21st Non-Consent Agenda, Item 76 and likely won’t come up for a vote before 11 AM. Please follow the links add your voices to ours in reaching out to City Council Members via email and registering to speak in support during the meeting. Our Vice-President, Chad Wallace, is planning to join me downtown for the afternoon. And Planning Commissioners Alice Woods and Felicity Maxwell will be in attendance. We’d love to have you join us if you feel so moved. Otherwise, speaker registration for the November 21, 2024 Austin City Council Meeting will open Monday, November 18 at 10:00 AM. Feel free to adopt and adapt our draft email message.

On November 14th, Carol participated in the City / Austin Housing Finance Corporation-sponsored Round Table Discussion: Strategic Expansion of Land Banking and CLTs to help guide new government policy for organizations working to provide affordable home-ownership opportunities. This group is slated to meet on a regular basis in the coming months.

Our participation in the Community Land Trust (CLT) Accelerator ends this month with another roundtable discussion on November 19th. Please look for news on important take-aways in December!

Our nine-member collaboration team (please see our last newsletter) responded to St. David’s recent invitation to apply for funding through their Housing + Health call on October 25th. Please watch for news of the results in December!

Thank Yous

Thank you, Council Member Zo Qadri, for speaking up on our behalf at the recent Housing and Planning Committee meeting in October where the Committee voted to advance the resolution in support of shared housing for seniors to the full Council for adoption.

Thank you to the entire Housing and Planning Committee for advancing the resolution for a full vote.

Thank you to City staff for inviting us to participate in the Round Table Discussion: Strategic Expansion of Land Banking and CLTs. We are very proud to be included.

October Updates

Again, we have great news to share!

We have excellent news on three fronts!

First, on September 27th, we received an email from St. David’s Foundation inviting us to apply for their Housing + Health Call for planning and predevelopment funding. We are overjoyed! Along with our collaborating friends at the Austin Creative Alliance, we now have a nine-way collaboration slated with Family Eldercare, the UTRGV Texas Rural Cooperative Center, Collective Seeds Consulting Cooperative, Sage Age, Forge Craft Architecture + Design, BEC Austin General Contractor, and Servitas (3P Developer).

An award will help us with a formal market study and pre-development activities so that we will be ready the moment a site becomes available again. The application is due before the end of this month and a decision will be handed down in December. We are working hard to prepare a worthy proposal - more updates to come!

Second, on October 3rd, the Housing and Planning Committee of the Austin City Council voted to forward the Planning Commission’s Resolution to the full Council for action. This is wonderful news! We anticipate the Draft Resolution, directing the City Manager to “explore the Planning Commission’s recommendation” to be on their October 24th agenda. (Be on the lookout for an ‘Action Alert’ once agenda is confirmed.)

Third, we just received word that the Austin Housing Coalition voted to send to the Austin City Council, urging them to pass the resolution. It is gratifying to have their support!

Once the item appears on Council’s agenda, follow the City’s guidelines to register your support! Speak Up Austin is the City’s portal for citizen input. Or reach out directly to your City Council Member.

Again, please watch for more news from us as the democratic process unfolds!

Thank Yous

Many thanks to the Austin Housing Coalition for stepping up in support of seniors and cooperative housing! We are truly grateful!

End Of Summer Updates

We took off the month July but have jumped back in with vigor as summer begins to wind down.

Highlights

If you haven’t visited our website lately, we have revised and updated our Mission Statement. This is an important change for us because it will allow us to advocate for limited-equity cooperative housing irrespective of a physical site and improve our odds of qualify for grant funding.

We’re very excited to announce we have added four new members to our team! We have two new board members, Amber Cox, a senior housing expert, and Dallas Richard, an urban planning and marketing expert, bringing our numbers to seven! Kenya Hodo is signing on as one of our first committee volunteers to help with both our fall fundraiser and upcoming events. And, to round out our expanded team, we have a new General Counsel, Kathleen Manchin. We are very excited to welcome them all and to have such a highly qualified and expanded team tackling our many next steps!

As we reported in our last newsletter, we were thrilled the City of Austin Planning Commission recently passed a resolution prioritizing the development of limited-equity senior housing coops on City-owned tracts within ETODs. The resolution is now in the hands of the City Council Housing and Planning Committee for discussion and approval at their August 28th meeting before being passed along to the full council for action, hopefully no later than October.

Regarding the resolution, please watch for more information as we get closer to the date.

St. David’s Foundation just released a Housing + Health call. Our friends at UTRGV and the Austin Creative Alliance are collaborating with us to respond.

Other News & Announcements

The Austin Housing Coalition, along with the AIA and Housing Works Austin, is hosting “HOT TAKES ON HOUSING: A MAYORAL AND CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATE FORUM” on Thursday, September 5th, from 5 to 8 PM at Assembly Hall, 1121 E 7th St. Please RSVP via Eventbrite and plan to attend!

Low Lights

We heard back from Austin Community Foundation with a denial to our recent funding request. We made the request before we changed our mission statement earlier this summer and much of our request was based on needs dependent upon a successful outcome at Ryan Drive. We will try again next spring, now that we no longer need to tie funding requests to a physical project.

Thank Yous

Many thanks to everyone who is helping bring this model into being—past and present. Yes, we still have a way to go, but we would not be this far along with the contributions of each of you.

Great Senior Housing News!

Happy Announcements For Summer 2023!

Whew! It’s only the beginning of another long hot summer in Austin. We hope you find time to play and enjoy these lazy summer days as we prepare for a busy and productive late summer and early fall.

Please remember to hydrate and stay safe in the heat no matter how you plan to enjoy the summer.

Highlights

We did it! We completed the AARP-sponsored Start.coop Spring 2023 Accelerator and received our first grant of $10,000. Until now, we have operated solely on the backs of our board members and the monies we have raised in two small fundraising events. Now we have enough funds for architectural renderings, marketing materials for informational events, and a small operations budget to help defray some of our ongoing startup expenses. Carol prepared a new pitch for our Start.coop graduation. The recorded video should be available for us to post on our website by the end of this week.

And we just received word last week—Carol has been accepted into the new 2023 Small Developer Training Program hosted by Capital Impact Partners and Housing Works Austin. Having created a draft of our important financial model during the course of the Start.coop accelerator, Carol will be honing and polishing it as she completes the Small Developer Training Program.

We won’t know the results until September, but we also just applied to receive a Capital Impact Partners 2023 Co-op Innovation Award, sponsored by the National Cooperative Bank. We should know by the end of July whether we will be a finalist in the competition.

We’re very pleased with all these developments!

Low Lights

We have still heard nothing from the developer or the City of Austin on the progress of Crestview Village and our small role in the project.

Many Thanks

Thank you John Vinson and Don Young for your years of board service! We wish you both all the best as you tend to your personal needs.

And we are very grateful to AARP, Start.coop, Cooperatives for a Better World, Capital Impact Partners, Housing Works Austin, and the National Cooperative Bank for supporting initiatives like ours.

Because we have lost two significant board members, we are on the lookout for new faces. If you have a passion—like we do—to solve this really tough nut of affordable housing for seniors, please contact Carol. She would love to hear from you!

Asks

As always, please share our news and newsletter widely!

Remember,

  • those wanting to support affordable cooperative housing for seniors in Austin can donate, and

… at any time by visiting our website.

If you are still sitting on the fence—but curious—please feel free to reach out via email.

Jumpstarting 2022!

Hi, it's Carol Lilly with Boomers Collaborative.

I wanted to personally reach out because we are kicking off our end-of-the-year fundraising campaign. We need a total of $60,000 for our planned operations budget for 2022. To jumpstart our efforts our goal is $10,000. Please consider chipping in $21 or more to help us get to $10,000 by the end of 2021!

We’re rethinking retirement. And our first Collaborative Housing effort (a shared-equity senior housing cooperative) is part of the winning proposal for the new Crestview Village redevelopment project. Now, it is time for us to establish an operations budget to fulfill all that will be required of us before project completion and move-in. Your contribution helps set the foundation for the future: We’ll hire an executive director; meet with the developer, creatives, lenders, restaurateurs, farmers, other nonprofits, and service providers; and make sure our first co-op residents and nonprofit board members are trained up. We’ll also be working to identify a second location, preferably in South Austin.

Boomers Collaborative has big plans for 2022 and beyond. Your contribution will help us move forward in this process. Without you, we won’t be able to finish building our vision. So we are reaching out to you and others who understand how necessary it is to rethink retirement for Baby Boomers, other seniors, and future generations.

As a grassroots organization, Boomers Collaborative is not supported by investors or corporate donors. We're currently fueled only by our passions. Please join us. Together, we can bring our powerful new vision for a stable, sustainable, and attainable retirement.

Contribute $21 or more.

Register to receive updates.

Thank you for being a part of this!


Happy Announcement!

If you haven’t seen the news, we are pleased to inform you that Austin City Council voted yesterday to “authorize negotiation and execution of an exclusive negotiation agreement with 3423 Holdings, LLC for ... the redevelopment of 6909 Ryan Drive, known as the Ryan Drive Site.” Best of all, 3423 Holdings, has included us in their affordability plans for the site, now Crestview Village, for us to open our first housing cooperative for a few of our participating seniors. NOTE: In their proposal, 3423 Holdings references us under the name Boomer Collective. We have no plans to change the name of our nonprofit, Boomers Collaborative Foundation, Inc. Our actual housing co-op is yet to be named.

Look for more detailed information in future newsletters!

July 2021 Newsletter

Wishing everyone well this summer!

Although we know the pandemic is not over, we hope most if not all of you are vaccinated and have enjoyed at least a few Covid-safe events or gatherings. Even as the surging pandemic and economic conditions remain uncertain, we are still planning our first project and want to pass along a few updates.

Highlights

We anticipate the City making an award to a developer on the Ryan Drive project any day now.

In readying ourselves for more formal operations, we want to formally report our prospective housing co-op numbers are growing! We also have exciting new, younger players volunteering for board services:  

    • Financial consultant, Blake Herner Vice President, Loan Operations Farm Credit Banks.

    • Board member, musician and graduate student, Jennifer Bernard.

We heartily welcome them both!

And, as we continue to flesh out our board and committee assignments, we hope to soon announce that we’ve engaged yet a third younger volunteer with both nonprofit and project management experience to help support our work!

We already have a firm relationship with board members of the Austin Cooperative Business Association (ACBA) and their 501c3 nonprofit foundation (ACBF). We are currently talking with them about strengthening our relationship.

Finally, we are researching and learning about Community Land Trusts (CLTs). They are one of the best ways to stabilize affordable housing in volatile markets and conserve housing for middle-income earners providing “long-term affordable homeownership units’’ that are “a reliable, sound investment for public and private partners” (Eliza Platts-Mills, 2018). We are very interested in learning more about CLTs and exploring how to develop additional Boomers Collaborative cooperatives through a CLT. We hope to soon discuss the need for public investment in CLTs with City Council members and other City officials.

Lowlights

Based on the City’s RFP and final projections for development of the entire Ryan Drive site, we learned we must pivot our model to a much smaller and alternate version. Because the entire development will meet our mixed-use needs and we were assured we can still meet our mission, we happily agreed to this change to lease our cooperative units directly from the developer.

Thank Yous

Many thanks to our new and prospective volunteers for stepping up to help bring a new model for shared housing to life.

Additional thanks to Drew De Los Santos with ACBA / F and Ryan Nill of CHEA Community Housing Expansion of Austin and ROC (Resident Owned Communities) USA for giving of their time and sharing their housing cooperative development expertise and knowledge with us.

Both of you are essential to our progress!

Asks

Having attended a recent Donorbox webinar by featuring fundraising expert Jay Frost, we are seeking a significant relationship with a single central Texas donor.

Works Cited

Eliza Platts-Mills, C. P. (2018, Summer). A Guide for Developing Community Land Trust Affordable Homeownership Programs in Texas, First Edition. (Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic) Retrieved July 20, 2021, from University of Texas School of Law.



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Hurray for Team Efforts & Expanded Options!

Happy summer, everyone!

I hope everyone is enjoying summer holidays, vacations, and the sun! In the meantime, the Boomers board of directors and partnering organizations are preparing marketing materials to share by the end of summer and at future Meetup events they will host, beginning this fall. 

The Lowdown on Planned Partners and Progress

We’re still planning to partner with others for a location in Council District 7. To that end, we are diligently working on preliminary plans with several new partner organizations. To design and construct our facility, we are working with

We expect to be ready to share architectural renderings and new marketing materials, including projected costs, to everyone wanting to reserve a unit with us by mid- to late summer.

We also plan to announce a full list of all team members in our next newsletter. This list includes an affordable housing expert, co-op housing experts, a bookkeeping firm, and the Austin Cooperative Business Foundation. For long-term funding to build and develop our model, we are in discussions with a local community development finance institution, interested in participating with us. 

Special Highlight—Expanded Options

We are especially delighted to announce we can now plan expanded unit options to better address missing-middle housing needs among Baby Boomers and other seniors. Not only will we offer 1/1 and 2/2 units, we will also offer shared-unit options for 2/2 and possibly 3/3 and 4/4 units, as well. With the help of committed members and prospects, we plan to more fully flesh out the community’s needs for various unit sizes by surveying interested individuals and couples and getting feedback at our events, beginning this fall.

Remember, under cooperative ownership rules, unit size and number of members per unit make no difference in one’s ability to own a share and vote. The only restriction applies to couples—couples may only join as one member, not two.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to participate! Through the help of the City’s Down Payment Assistance program and other* financial services, membership and housing should be within reach of broad numbers of Baby Boomers and other seniors, especially elder orphans.

_____

* For more information about other financial services, contact us.

Thanks and Acknowledgements

Thank you, Lee Follender, for stepping in to help out on the board while Karen is on sabbatical.

Share this newsletter and our news freely! And watch your in box for our update later this summer or early fall. If you are not on our mailing list yet, please feel free to sign up on our website, BoomersCollaborative.org.

 

It’s 2019 and Boomers Collaborative is on the Move!

Boomer’s Collaborative made significant progress in 2018. We started the year uncertain about how to move forward, but by year’s end we had a site identified and were working to close relationships with several partners.

Highlights

  • We identified a highly-desirable site in a transit-oriented district (TOD) on Ryan Drive. It is a city-owned property on the Metro rail line that will be subject to a Request for Proposals (RFP) later this year.

  • We also identified a redevelopment partner to respond to the RFP, a general contractor to build the project, and an affordable housing expert to participate in the City’s Affordable Housing Program. We will soon meet with an architect who often works with our prospective general contractor partner.

  • We launched our website at www.boomerscollaborative.org.

  • We were asked to apply and participated in Impact Hub’s Fall 2018 Affordability Accelerator.

  • We are in discussions with a local Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) for financing of the project (including share loans* for individuals).

  • In December, the City of Austin Commission on Seniors voted to support the Boomers Collaborative cooperative housing and mixed-use creative space model

  • The Austin Cooperative Business Association (ACBA) has agreed to work with us, and we are retaining Key Figures Cooperative to keep our books.

Thank Yous

Many thanks to Teresa Ferguson and AustinUP for their support and help with our recent survey.

Thank you Brandi Clark Burton of EcoNetworking for donating lunch hours to mentor us during the Impact HUB Affordability Accelerator.

Since appreciation to Ashley Phillips, Reagan Pugh, and Kelsey Willard for the experience of the Impact HUB Affordability Accelerator — ushering us through the process, opening doors, and helping us refine our pitch.

How You Can Help

Provide Expertise: We need to establish relationships with the following:

  • A restaurateur

  • A high-quality artisanal product retailer

  • Artists

  • Makers

LOIs: We will be accepting Letters of Intent (LOIs) from all prospective residents, partners, and commercial tenants. A draft Letter of Intent is currently under development. Look for it soon!

Volunteer: Consider serving on our board of directors.

Donate: Visit our website to contribute. We humbly and sincerely appreciate donations in any amount to help us grapple with housing affordability in a new way.