Housing Counseling Process Evaluation and Design of ... - HUD User

Chapter Four.
Intermediaries and State Housing
Finance Agencies
Counseling intermediaries are national or regional entities that provide counseling services either
directly through branch offices or indirectly through affiliated counseling agencies. These
organizations play an important role in helping to support high quality services by providing training,
technical assistance, funding, and oversight of local counseling agencies. State housing finance
agencies (SHFAs) play essentially the same role in supporting counseling agencies in their respective
states. One very important role of intermediaries and SHFAs is serving as a conduit for HUD
funding, applying directly to HUD and then in turn passing this funding along to their branches and
affiliates. Becoming an affiliate of an intermediary or SHFA enables an agency to receive HUD
funding without completing the full application for HUD funds itself; intermediaries and SHFAs also
typically provide affiliates with other forms of support, such as training and technical assistance.
As HUD’s commitment to housing counseling has grown since the early 1990s, so too has their
reliance on intermediaries and SHFAs as a means of channeling funding to local housing counseling
agencies. In 1995, HUD funded a total of 5 intermediaries who received a little more than a third of
total counseling funding. SHFAs were not funded at that time. In FY 1998, when HUD’s funding for
counseling agencies jumped from $11.6 million to $17.5 million, the reliance of intermediaries and
SHFAs increased substantially. In FY 1998, intermediaries’ and SHFAs’ share of total counseling
funding accounted for nearly two-thirds of all HUD funding. This ratio has remained fairly close to
that level ever since. In recent years, HUD has awarded about 58 percent of its housing counseling
funds to national and regional housing counseling intermediaries and about 5 percent to SHFAs. 18
Given the importance of intermediaries and SHFAs in supporting, funding, and overseeing local
housing counseling agencies (LHCAs), a significant focus of this study was to investigate the nature
of these organizations and their specific roles in the housing counseling industry. In the summer of
2007, we interviewed 18 of the 20 national and regional intermediaries that received HUD housing
counseling funds in FY 2007 and all 17 SHFAs that received HUD funding that year. The primary
goal of the interviews was to understand in detail the role that intermediaries and SHFAs play in
supporting the housing counseling industry and their relationship to LHCAs. In addition to HUDfunded
intermediaries and SHFAs, we also interviewed 23 SHFAs and housing organizations that did
not receive HUD housing counseling funds in FY 2007 (although they may have in previous years),
with the goal of understanding whether and how these organizations fund housing counseling
activities without resources from HUD.
This chapter provides a profile of the national and regional intermediaries and SHFAs that support
housing counseling, followed by a discussion of the relationships between LHCAs and
intermediaries, SHFAs, and other industry players.
18
As noted in Chapter 2, the large difference in the share of funding channeled through intermediaries versus
SHFAs is in part because intermediaries support nearly 1,000 local agencies or branches while SHFAs
support a total of about 150 local counseling agencies.
Chapter 4. Intermediaries and State Housing Finance Agencies 41