Reflections from the Southwest NAHRO Annual Conference — OKANA, Oklahoma City, June 2026
Last week, I spoke at the Southwest NAHRO Annual Conference in Oklahoma City. My session was about resident outreach and why housing organizations must stop reacting and start connecting with the people they serve. I prepared slides and statistics, but what stayed with me was the conversation in the room: communication has quietly become one of the hardest problems in housing, and the people who do this work feel it every day.
I opened with a simple question: how many of you have had to tell a resident the same thing over and over? Enrollment is today. Recertification is today. Did I mention recertification is today? Nearly every hand in the room went up. It got a laugh, then went quiet. Everyone recognized it.
The problem paid no attention to size. One agency in the room covered twelve counties and seven thousand square miles; another managed fewer than forty units with a team of two who still hand-delivered notices door to door. Between them, dozens of organizations of every shape, sharing no budget, headcount, or service area, yet all relying on essentially the same communication toolkit, one never designed for the demands it now faces.
That toolkit fails in familiar ways. Email goes unread, or lands after a phone number has changed. A letter about a Thursday deadline gets mailed on Wednesday night. A text-sized notice becomes a phone call no one answers. This is not carelessness; it is what happens when staff are stretched thin, and the right channel is out of reach. The cost lands on residents who miss time-sensitive alerts and never learn about the help they qualify for. When I asked how many believed their residents actually knew what was available to them, a single hand went up. Asked where residents turn for information today, the room's honest answer was the leasing office, the website, and Facebook, an algorithm that no housing authority controls, quietly standing in as the official channel.
Underneath all of this sits a stubborn myth: that residents who lack broadband are simply unreachable. I tested it with a game: three questions about resident access and a hundred-dollar gift card for landing all three correct answers. The guesses came back so far off that I scrapped the prize for a raffle. A room full of housing professionals misjudged how connected their own residents are. Pew Research finds that 79 percent of adults earning under $30,000 own a smartphone, and that roughly a third of them rely on it as their main way to get online; not occasional users, but phone-first ones. Home broadband is where the real gap sits; only about half of the lowest-income households subscribe at home. For many residents, the phone is not a backup to the internet; it is the internet. The barrier is not whether residents have a phone; it is whether our outreach is built to reach them on it.
This was the heart of my talk: the difference between reacting and connecting. Most housing communication is reactive by design. A paper notice, a website, a social post, all information that sits there and waits to be found, putting the burden on the resident to go looking. Proactive communication flips that burden. Asked what that looks like in practice, I gave a concrete answer: rather than blasting everyone, tell Building One its power is off for grid work today and leave Building Three out of it. Send people things that do not apply to them, and they tune them out. Relevance earns the next message a read , and that includes language, which in this room meant Spanish, Haitian Creole, Russian, and even American Sign Language.
None of this means abandoning the channels that work, or forcing everything into one app. A lease notice belongs on paper. A long, complex explanation belongs in an email. Some residents will only be reached in person, and we cannot leave them behind; a multi-channel approach is not optional. The shift I am arguing for is one of order, not inventory: keep every channel, but lead with mobile. When an attendee asked whether we offered a desktop version, my answer was no, on purpose. More residents have a smartphone than a home computer, so the discipline is to design for the phone first, putting the device people already carry at the front of the line and treating paper, email, and the rest as deliberate fallbacks.
Why now? Because attention has moved. Pew finds about four in ten U.S. adults are online almost constantly, and for lower-income residents, that connection runs through a phone. Where attention lives, mobile stops being an upgrade and becomes the place you start. The cost of staying reactive is not abstract: benefits go unclaimed, deadlines pass, and residents conclude that the organization meant to help them is unreliable. Trust is specific; a resident has to read the message, believe it came from you, and act on it. That chain breaks if you miss enough times. There is a harder consequence, too: if you cannot measure whether your communication is landing, you cannot prove your programs work or win the grants that fund them. Measurement is not vanity. For many agencies, it is survival.
By the end of the session, one idea had crystallized: most housing authorities are really community-based organizations in disguise. They connect people not only to housing but to benefits, services, and a web of partners, so their communication has to do the same. That conviction is also behind a change we made at the conference, where we retired the Homes4Good name and brought the work under a single brand, Patter COMPASS. But the larger point belongs to no platform. The professionals in Oklahoma City already knew the old playbook was not keeping up. Their residents are reachable. The work ahead is not convincing anyone that communication matters, but reordering how we do it, so the channel people live on leads instead of trailing behind.