In this special edition, recorded live at the 2025 Kentucky Affordable Housing Conference, we explore collaborative strategies to accelerate housing supply across the region. Featuring Tara Johnson-Noem on Northern Kentucky’s “Home for All” initiative, Kristen Baker on the “Housing Our Future” strategy, and Abby Shelton on the Greater Owensboro Area Housing Collaborative, this episode highlights how data-driven planning, cross-sector collaboration, and community engagement are reshaping housing solutions in Kentucky and across the Ohio River.

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation launched READI in 2021 with $500 million in state appropriations to coordinate strategic investments to bring talent and economic growth to every region in the Hoosier state. Thanks to public, private, and nonprofit partners, that original investment has been leveraged to more than $12.6 billion for Indiana communities. Another $500 will be allocated as part of READI 2.0, focusing on quality of life, place, and opportunities. In this episode, we speak with Jim Rawlinson, director of READI, and Heidi Young, senior program manager, about how READI is driving economic development in every region of Indiana and what Kentucky can learn from its neighbor.

The Supportive Housing Institute is the flagship training series of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). It is a comprehensive training for supportive housing development teams — a developer, a manager, and a supportive service provider — that wish to develop a Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) project. In this episode, the final installment of our series on PSH, we speak to Julie Wischer, executive director of the Elevate, who attended the Institute during the development of Elevate Estates, a 48-unit PSH facility for individuals who struggle to live independently because of a disability.

The Supportive Housing Institute is the flagship training series of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). It is a comprehensive training for supportive housing development teams, which include a developer, a manager, and a supportive service provider. In this episode, the second in our Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) series, we speak to Ra'Shann Martin, executive director of the St. John Center, who attended the Institute during the development of Sheehan Landing, an 80-unit PSH facility designed to address the unique needs of people who experience multiple, complex physical and mental disabilities. St. John Center has been providing scattered-site PSH since 2008, but Sheehan Landing is its first single-site PSH.

The Supportive Housing Institute is the flagship training series of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). It is a comprehensive training for supportive housing development teams, which include a developer, a manager, and a supportive service provider. They learn about capital financing, operating financing, supportive services dollars, best practices, fair housing, and much more. At the end of the curriculum, which takes about six months to complete, teams present their projects to a panel of funders to get feedback that strengthens their applications for funding. In this episode, we speak with Leah Werner, the director of the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee team at CSH, to gain a better understanding of the Supportive Housing Institute and the role it has played in permanent supportive housing in Kentucky.

In June 2024, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce released a report on the state of workforce housing in the Commonwealth. In essence, the report said, as the state continues to attract new businesses, housing the workforce will become a challenge. The housing shortage may, in fact, deter business development. In this episode, we speak with Charles Aull, executive director for the Center for Policy and Research at the Kentucky Chamber, about the report, Kentucky's workforce housing shortage, land-use and zoning reform, the importance of local housing assessments, and revisiting the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, among other discussion topics.

Since 2003, the Metropolitan Housing Coalition (MHC) has released an annual report on the housing situation in Louisville/Jefferson County. This year's edition focuses on land use and zoning. In this episode, we speak with Tony Curtis, executive director of the MHC, and two of the report's authors: Darrin Wilson, associate professor of Public Administration, and Janet Harrah, senior director of the Center for Economic Analysis and Development—both from Northern Kentucky University. Curtis, Wilson, and Harrah discuss missing middle housing, zoning reform, and policy recommendations for closing the housing gap across Kentucky.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations created to give residents control over land use and development in their communities. In this episode, we visit with Kevin Dunlap, president and chief executive officer of Rebound, Inc., who helped to secure funding for two CLTs, and Victor Williams, lead organizer of the Berrytown Community Land Trust, to discuss the genesis of three newly created CLTs in Louisville — two near downtown and another near Anchorage in the northeast. Dunlap and Williams discuss these CLTs and how they create a pathway to generational wealth for low- and moderate-income local families.

In 1974, Congress passed the National Mobile home Construction and Safety Standards Act, which created the so-called HUD Code regulation. Since then, there have been no more "mobile" homes. There are, however, manufactured homes, or homes built indoors in climate-controlled manufacturing environments in a streamlined process that has been refined for four decades. They are built in single or multiple sections, and, like site-built homes, now come in various configurations with customizable layout, flooring, and finishes. They are subject to the same rigorous quality standards as traditional homes and many are now eligible for conventional mortgages and even down-payment assistance.

In this episode, we talk with two long-time industry professionals—Logan Hanes from the Kentucky Manufactured Housing Institute and Ramsey Cohen from Clayton Homes—to find out more about this often-overlooked process and how it may prove to be an important player in the campaign to address the affordable housing supply gap in Kentucky.

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Kentucky Manufactured Housing Institute

Clayton Homes

Manufactured Housing and Standards - Frequently Asked Questions

Kentucky Housing Corporation (KHC) awards the special designation of Community Housing Development Organization (CHDO) to select nonprofit housing agencies that have an existing partnership with KHC and a proven record of producing HOME-funded affordable housing projects in their service areas. Essentially, a CHDO is a nonprofit, community-based service organization that has significant capacity to develop affordable housing for the community it serves. Among the CHDOs in Kentucky is Habitat for Humanity of Henderson, which is the first and currently the only Habitat in the Commonwealth to receive this special designation.

To learn more about CHDOs and the associated benefits, we sat down with two administrators from Habitat for Humanity of Henderson —Executive Director Britney Smith and Chief Operating Officer Matt Reynolds — and two administrators from KHC — Curtis Stauffer, managing director of Housing Contract Administration (HCA), and Keli Reynolds, assistant director of HCA Single-Family Programs. In about a decade, Habitat of Henderson has gone from being an organization with the capacity to build one home per year to an organization with the capacity to build five. With the help of the CHDO designation, Britney and Matt are making a significant contribution to affordable housing opportunities in their community.

To learn more about becoming a CHDO, visit https://www.kyhousing.org/Partners/Developers/Single-Family/Pages/Community-Housing-Development-Organizations.

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Habitat for Humanity of Henderson