A Bold 10-Year Goal for Affordable Housing in the Coachella Valley

Lift to Rise and its part­ners are on track to add 10,000 new units of afford­able hous­ing to California’s Coachel­la Val­ley by 2028. Rec­og­niz­ing hous­ing inse­cu­ri­ty as a key fac­tor in address­ing pover­ty, local lead­ers used the Results Count^® frame­work to pri­or­i­tize this initiative.

“In 2015, it wasn’t broad­ly accept­ed that afford­able hous­ing is a root cause dri­ver of all of these oth­er oppres­sive things like food inse­cu­ri­ty and home­less­ness,” said Heather Vaikona, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Lift to Rise. ​“Our ini­tial Results Count work was to set a data base­line and see what was hap­pen­ing at the pop­u­la­tion lev­el, not the indi­vid­ual pro­gram level.”

Learn more about Results Count

Results Count, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s sig­na­ture approach to lead­er­ship devel­op­ment, stress­es the impor­tance of col­lab­o­ra­tion, equi­ty and the use of data to set tar­gets and mea­sure progress. Its tools and skills have helped Vaikona and her peers lis­ten and respond to their com­mu­ni­ty — and in the process, allow the voic­es of the peo­ple they serve to shape and refine how results are achieved.

Increas­ing Afford­able Hous­ing in Coachel­la Valley

Vaikona and her col­leagues were part of a Results Count cohort that the Casey Foun­da­tion led with Feed­ing Amer­i­ca, a nation­al hunger-relief net­work. From 2015 to 2018, Vaikona laid the foun­da­tion for Lift to Rise. While she estab­lished it as a col­lec­tive impact orga­ni­za­tion tack­ling food secu­ri­ty, health, employ­ment and hous­ing, she devel­oped pro­fi­cien­cy in the Results Count approach.

The Coachel­la Val­ley, which com­pris­es nine cities and sev­er­al unin­cor­po­rat­ed com­mu­ni­ties, is a geo­graph­i­cal­ly vast and demo­graph­i­cal­ly diverse region in South­ern California’s River­side Coun­ty. Known for its wealthy vaca­tion­ers, music fes­ti­val and recre­ation, the area’s hos­pi­tal­i­ty econ­o­my is dri­ven by a less vis­i­ble year-round pop­u­la­tion of under­paid, pri­mar­i­ly Lati­no workers.

“It was always evi­dent that our econ­o­my is built on the backs of the labor of low-income peo­ple of col­or who are not paid enough mon­ey to stay housed or feed their chil­dren,” said Vaikona. ​“Before Results Count, we were con­stant­ly look­ing at small­er data base­lines and miss­ing the big thing.”

Instead of more nar­row data points like rates of child­hood obe­si­ty, food inse­cu­ri­ty and access to cred­it, Lift to Rise found that the ​“big thing” was rent bur­den, a func­tion of the sup­ply and cost of hous­ing. It began to focus on the num­ber of peo­ple spend­ing more than one-third of their income on rent. 

“Usu­al­ly, hous­ing is dis­cussed through a pol­i­cy or invest­ment lens, but our north star has always been that we want all Coachel­la Val­ley fam­i­lies to be healthy, sta­ble and thriv­ing,” said Vaikona. ​“To get there, we knew we need­ed to reduce rent bur­den and increase eco­nom­ic opportunity.”

It wouldn’t be enough to work incre­men­tal­ly. Instead, Lift to Rise set a bold 10-year goal to increase the hous­ing sup­ply by 10,000 units by 2028, there­by reduc­ing region­al rent bur­den by 30%. 

“We [arrived at] that goal because between 2010 and 2018, the entire Val­ley pro­duced an aver­age of 38 units of afford­able hous­ing a year, and that wasn’t going to cut it at a pop­u­la­tion lev­el,” said Vaikona. ​“Now, we have more than 1,600 units under con­struc­tion in our region and are on tar­get to hit our 10-year goal.”

The Hous­ing Col­lab­o­ra­tive Action Network

Accord­ing to Vaikona, being ground­ed in a shared result from the start has allowed the Lift to Rise to pur­sue trans­for­ma­tion­al change. In 2017, the orga­ni­za­tion estab­lished the Hous­ing Col­lab­o­ra­tive Action Net­work. It includes over 75 local stake­hold­ers who have devel­oped a shared vision to address the lack of afford­able hous­ing in the region. They include:

• res­i­dent groups; 
• com­mu­ni­ty-based organizations; 
• pri­vate developers; 
• non­prof­it developers;
• local gov­ern­ments;
• polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives; and
• funders.

Notably, the net­work has engaged lin­guis­ti­cal­ly iso­lat­ed and under­served populations.

“The hard­est thing to do is to work togeth­er with oth­er folks, and then the sec­ond hard­est thing to do is to face your­self,” said Vaikona. ​“Adap­tive lead­er­ship includes learn­ing how to name and acknowl­edge dynam­ics, explic­it­ly racial dynam­ics, and learn­ing how to lead in the con­text of the com­plex his­to­ries we’re all liv­ing in. Stay­ing focused on that one piece that is our aligned con­tri­bu­tion — that’s what has real­ly set us up for success.”

Lift to Rise con­tin­ues to build the Results Count com­pe­ten­cies of staff through a grant from the Casey Foun­da­tion. All staff are encour­aged to learn the framework’s core com­pe­ten­cies and apply them by build­ing and facil­i­tat­ing aligned meet­ings and work plans. Lift to Rise engages in a six-month plan­ning peri­od every oth­er year to get the orga­ni­za­tion and its part­ners clos­er to their 10-year result.

“It’s a con­stant thing,” said Vaikona. ​“While we’re always try­ing to get it right, I know we couldn’t have built such a com­pre­hen­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion with­out using the Results Count competencies.”

Read about the impor­tance of com­mu­ni­ty engagement