WCDA Director David Haney Featured at National Housing Forum

Casper - David Haney, Executive Director of the Wyoming Community Development Authority (WCDA), was a featured panelist at a national forum on employer-assisted housing recently.

The 2009 Northwestern Regional Forum on Employer-Assisted Housing titled, “Bring Workers Home” in Boise, Idaho, brought housing experts from throughout the United States together to discuss the topic of employers offering housing assistance as an additional employment benefit. The forum was a joint effort between the National Association of REALTORS® and the National Housing Conference.

Haney was asked to speak about the WCDA’s homebuyer program – the “Spirit! of Wyoming Homeownership Initiative” which was developed by WCDA to address the concerns of local government leaders throughout Wyoming for an initiative that provides communities with a tool to help recruit and retain workers in certain occupations. The program provides mortgage loan financing for homebuyers employed in occupations deemed critical to the health, safety, and vitality of Wyoming’s communities. Active military personnel and military veterans are also eligible to qualify for the Spirit! Program.

Occupational categories defined under the Spirit! Program are community and social service occupations, education, training, and library occupations, healthcare practitioners and technical occupations, healthcare support occupations, and protective service occupations. In addition to being required to fall within one of the above mentioned categories, applicants must meet the income and purchase price limits of WCDA’s standard first-time homeowner program, but do not have to be first-time homebuyers.

“Although the WCDA’s Spirit! Program is not an employer-assisted housing program, it is an innovative example of using housing as a way to recruit and retain workers,” Haney said. “Recruiting and retaining workers is at the absolute core of why employer-assisted housing programs exist in the first place.”

In addition to Haney, other speakers, panelists, and presenters – from bankers to real estate professionals to metropolitan planning officials to directors of various housing organizations and non-profits – were featured throughout the multi-day forum. Examples of successful employer-assisted housing programs were also presented and discussed.

Haney, who has been the Executive Director at the WCDA since 2007, was also recently elected to the National Council of State Housing Agencies Board of Directors and was chosen to lead a rural housing task force made up of other directors of state housing agencies in predominantly rural states.