Lead to Succeed - Amy Hovey of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA)

In this episode of Lead to Succeed, host Steve Arwood talks with Amy Hovey, Executive Director and CEO of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA), about what it takes to tackle Michigan’s housing shortage. She walks through MSHDA’s  toolbox from vouchers, mortgages, and home repair programs to Missing Middle investments, housing TIF, and new mixed-income financing models and explains how these tools are being used in rural regions and tribal communities, including the Upper Peninsula.

Learn more about InvestUP at https://www.investupmi.com. Connect with us on social media at https://www.linkedin.com/company/invest-up-mi/. 

Transcript

Steve Arwood   2:28
Well, welcome to Lead to Succeed, our weekly or bi-weekly podcast sponsored by Invest UP. Pleased today to have with us the Executive Director and CEO of the Michigan State Housing and Development Authority, Ms. Amy Hubby. How are you today?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   2:47
I'm doing well. How about yourself?

Steve Arwood   2:49
Great, great. Well, let's jump right into it. I mean, a lot of people know about MSHDA. They know the acronym. They see the work in their community. But MSHDA has been around for a while. So maybe just to kind of, you know, level set this for our folks, you know, maybe give us a little background.
Ground on Michigan, what his primary mission is, and then we'll go from there.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   3:15
Yeah. I mean, I'd like to think, you know, Michigan is all things housing. Overall, our mission is pretty basic. We want to make sure that every single Michigan resident has a place to call home, right, a place to go to at the end of the day. We do that in several different ways. So we have programs.
Throughout the spectrum of the housing ecosystem, starting with homeless programs, we provide funding for some shelters. We also do the balance of state for continuum of care, which is kind of coordinating the care for homeless in our state in areas where they.
They don't have the capacity to manage it themselves. We also provide emergency services grants and then we provide about 30,000 families with what we call Housing Choice Vouchers, which most people will remember as Section 8, which is rental assistance that really helps.

Our most vulnerable families in the state pay their rent. In Michigan, we prioritize the homeless with our vouchers in the state. We also provide a single family mortgage, which is one of our largest programs, which not everyone knows, but they should. So I love this.
Opportunity to talk about that. In fact, this year we're going to provide almost a billion dollars in single family mortgages. And what makes our mortgage so great is it comes with $10,000 of down payment assistance.
Really helping first time home buyers settle into a home that they own and we operate that working with mortgage originators across the state. So we don't originate our own mortgages. Banks and mortgage companies originate them on our behalf. So we have.
Spread.
Throughout the entire state, we have a goal of doing at least a loan in every county, including all those up in the UP and have made several, several loans up there. So it's a program that is really impactful in getting people in stability and safe housing.
Situations. And then what we're most known for is probably our Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which we allocate on behalf of the federal government, which provides subsidies for the development of multifamily housing for affordable housing.

Steve Arwood   5:39
You.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   5:50
Families between, you know, zero to primarily up to 60, some up to 80% of area median income. Those are our main programs. We also have a small neighborhood program called My Neighborhood.

Steve Arwood   5:58
Mhm.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   6:05
I say small, but it puts out about $60 million a year, so it's not that small, but it's for small projects. So not everyone's going to come and do a large multifamily project, but some communities need infill within their built environment.

Steve Arwood   6:10
Mhm.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   6:22
Or homeowner repair programs. We know in our state that over 50% of our housing is over 50 years old and you know, some people just need a new roof to stabilize their housing situation and their home and we have funding for that as well. So that's kind of the basics of what we do.

Steve Arwood   6:33
Mhm.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I know for the past couple of years your work has been prioritized, you know, putting new units in our Michigan needs. I can't remember what the number is, but it's an incredible amount.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   6:52
Yeah.
119,000, yeah.

Steve Arwood   6:57
119,000, thank you. An incredible amount of new units simply because of the, you know, the age of our housing stock and the demand. How, how is that going? I mean what's that look like? I know that there have been.
You know, there've been some budget cuts and moving forward, things might look a little more challenging on that front, but can you tell us how that's working out?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   7:23
Yeah, well, we do have a statewide housing plan that kind of helps guide how we tackle the housing crisis in our state. And when the governor approved that plan, she also put a goal in place originally for us to help develop.
75,000 housing units. We are doing so well at that goal that she upped it last May to 115,000 housing units and we're close to 80,000 right now, so.

Steve Arwood   7:41
Mhm.
What are those? What are those? Pardon me, but what do those units look like and where? I mean what? How do you count that unit when you say, OK, there's one unit, where is it? What does it look like? Who's it targeted for?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   7:53
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a great question. So I think the best way that we can count those is we use building permit information throughout the state. And so we take about 95% of what building permits are pulled to calculate housing production within our state. We know that about 5% of permits that get pulled don't actually result in housing. So we make a discount by about 5% and that's where we come up with what our housing production looks like in our state. So it includes housing that's not just being incentivized by the government or by MHTA, but it includes housing that are naturally occurring with the market in general. So you know, more people are coming to the table to do housing. Employers are now really trying to join efforts to get housing built where it's needed, you know, across the state.

Steve Arwood   8:45
Mm-hmm. OK.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   9:01
state. When I'm visiting, I hear consistently from business owners. It's hard to recruit employees because there's just no affordable places for them to live. And, you know, Steve, I think we all know that the cost of housing skyrocketed while our incomes in our state have, you know, remained

Steve Arwood   9:11
OK.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   9:20
Flat.

Steve Arwood   9:22
Mhm.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   9:23
And so more and more people are having a difficult time finding a place to live. So, well, we've tried to be innovative, really bring money outside of our state to our state. You know, let me just give you this stat because it's something I'm super proud of.
You know, in 2022, Mishta invested $700 million in housing in our state. In 2024, we did over 1.1 billion. You know, I think it's actually 1.21 billion, but like a huge increase.

Steve Arwood   9:47
Mhm.
Mhm.
Mhm.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   10:00
The amount of funding that we've been putting in, I think I have that wrong. Is it 2.1 billion? Actually, let me correct that. It's actually 2.1 billion. So I mean just a ton of money that we're putting through and that's because you know we're now asking for investments from folks like the Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis.
Who, you know, not only allowed us to drop our mortgage rate by 1%, but heavily invested in programs like our Tribal Nation Housing Development Assistance Program, which has really impacted tribes across our state and of course in the UP.

Steve Arwood   10:29
Mhm.
Mm-hmm.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   10:40
Where several of our tribes have reservation lands. So you know, really looking for new partners to help us bring additional funding to the problem of housing.

Steve Arwood   10:44
Well, there's been a, you know, Michigan's had a historical, you know, influence and focus on low-income housing. I think it's the right term. And then now we, you know, then there's the affordable housing, but.
A couple of years ago we were all introduced to the idea of the missing middle, you know, housing situation where you know, whether it's moving up or you know, needing to have that.
More traditionally maybe market rate type housing in a lot of our communities, the missing middle you know is kind of defined by the 80 to 120 AM I can can you talk about that a bit and have we made?

Steve Arwood   11:44
Impact there over the last couple of years.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   11:47
We definitely have made an impact. It is true that because of the circumstances of housing costs skyrocketing but incomes remaining flat, that you know, we need to help more people get into housing up the income scale. And you know, the state agreed that it was a big issue in being able to make sure that people we come into contact with every day, our teachers, our nurses, our public sector workers, our manufacturers, you know, we're having trouble securing housing. So the legislators.

Steve Arwood   12:13
Police and fire.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   12:22
Invested in our Missing Middle program $110 million. It went very quickly because it's needed throughout the state. That was a grant program, but we have since also created the Housing TIF, a Housing Tax Increment Financing program, which is available.

Steve Arwood   12:39
Me.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   12:41
Also for households up to 120% of area median income and we've been seeing that tool really blossom over the last year. In fact, we just approved our 50th plan resulting. Yeah, yeah. And I think we're edging towards 4000 units of housing created.

Steve Arwood   12:54
I was gonna ask how many? Yeah, uh.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   13:01
Did with that program alone. So it's been very impactful and you know what I love about that program is it's really flexible. So it can be used to rehabilitate existing houses for building new home ownership. We see it for sale products. We also see it being used for rental. So really meeting that need. For folks all the way up to 120% anywhere in the state, you know it can also be used on green fields if need be in certain communities where the built environment, you know, just can't take additional housing units. And I love that program too, because it's a predictable source of financing. So many of our programs are reliant on appropriations from the federal and state government. And sometimes you get in the budget and sometimes you don't get in the budget and sometimes it decreases but TIF is always there.

Steve Arwood   13:42
So true. So true.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   13:58
But it doesn't run out, right? So if I'm a developer, I know that if it is a priority for the local government to do this housing and they're willing to approve that TIF plan, it's gonna come to MSHDA. If it's a housing TIF, we get to approve it in an administrative way and it's simply a checklist.

Steve Arwood   13:59
Thanks.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   14:18
A developer can go to that checklist and say if I meet this, the answer is yes.

Steve Arwood   14:22
Yes, we're seeing a rise in the interest in that communities kind of starting to get their head around that that traditionally might not have thought about that you know kind of tiffs in general are relatively nascent in.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   14:23
2.

Steve Arwood   14:38
You know, a lot of parts of Michigan, but what do you say to a community that wants housing, needs housing, says we have a, you know, we have a problem with housing, but you know, the developer wants us to look at this TIF for housing and we don't.
Either think maybe that's necessary or right or whatever. What? What's your response to that? Because.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   15:01
Yeah.
You know, we need the local governments to participate. Just the gap is too big. We need them to come to the table. You know, pilots and tiffs are an easy way for them to come. You know, at MISHA, we created a Get Housing Ready guide which is on our website that is a checklist.

Steve Arwood   15:10
Mhm.
Mm.
Mhm.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   15:22
Of what local governments can do to be housing friendly, meaning to attract developers somewhat similar to the redevelopment ready communities at MEDC, except for it's really geared just specifically to housing, looking at your zoning for housing, looking at how you're quick your.

Steve Arwood   15:34
Yes.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   15:42
Processes, approving TIFs and and pilots. And you know, the gap is so big between what it costs to develop and what people can afford. We need everyone to come to the table and we need local governments if housing's important to them.
And their businesses and their residents and their school teachers, you know, they need to really consider approving those plans, especially like a TIF plan. They're not giving up tax revenue. As you know, if they don't approve it, they're not going to get any revenue.
You know, in this they'll at least maybe get an income tax or some economic impact of more folks living in their communities. And yes.

Steve Arwood   16:23
Kids in school, you know, money spent in the community, people planting roots,  it's yes, all the things, I always say on the TIF debate that it's like the old.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   16:34
All the things, yeah.

Steve Arwood   16:40
Lyric. I think it was a Billy Preston song that said nothing from nothing leaves nothing. So, you know, something is, yeah.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   16:45
Right.
Well, in our homes, you know, we have homes that are over 100 years old in our state, right? Like giving up tax revenue for 10 or 15 years or just that increment on that tax revenue, you're going to get that like that's going to go back on the tax rolls for many decades to come.

Steve Arwood   16:55
No, no.
Yes.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   17:09
Right. But if we don't get it built, it's going to be built somewhere else and your community is going to be left behind.

Steve Arwood   17:15
True. So you know, in the UP15 counties, you know, wide jurisdictions, smaller communities, we don't really have one macro economy. We have, you know, different economies. The sweet spot to really gain ground seems to be in those five to 8 units kind of, you know, here's a community that needs housing. It's 5 to 8 units. It's, you know, and maybe you can do that repeatedly for the communities that are trying to attract that. What advice do you have for them?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   17:37
Yeah. You know everyone can be a developer if it's that small of a project, right? Like we try to reduce the barriers to accessing our funding and really got the idea from a trip I took to the UP and meeting with business owners and this was specifically I think in the Keweenaw and they were talking. About like I have employees who are living in tents. I want to help provide housing and they only need 8 employees or five employees and or housing for eight or five employees. And you know, we created the My Neighborhood program, which is, you know, $100,000 per unit of just simple grants. You know, and the only thing is you have to rent them to folks 120% or below. There is a small set aside for 60% and below, but really and and it's for emerging developers, you don't have to have any previous experience. We also created the Great Lakes Housing Services, which is a non-profit that will provide free technical assistance to local governments and non-profit developers and even small emerging developers who want to get in the business but just don't know where to go and need some hand holding. That's what they're there to do. So we provided that resource and then we also created the Employer Assisted Housing Fund, which. So let's say we have a small business who wants to develop some homes or a duplex or something. We will match dollar for dollar their investment up to $2,000,000. So it can also be a donation of property. So let's say you have a big hospital or a manufacturer or you know any business who is willing to say, you know what, I don't need this excess property, I'll donate it. We'll match the value of that as well. So we really are trying to. Those eight units can be very meaningful in some of our more rural communities.

Steve Arwood   20:13
Absolutely. Well in talking about that, I mean one of the things that you know I have found directly through our build up program in working with you know our developers and banks and communities is you know in the Upper Peninsula it's you know it's not any cheaper to build. In the Upper Peninsula than anywhere else, interest rates remain high. Construction costs are high. The gap is the gap. You know, whether you build it in downtown Grand Rapids or you build it in downtown Marquette, in some cases it may be more money because of, you know, season.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   20:38
That's right.

Steve Arwood   20:53
Labor availability, all the other issues. With the MED CS budget being restricted, at least in this fiscal year, I mean where do you see Michigan moving to maybe keep pushing this market because we were having.
Great traction, you know, and hopefully we'll find new ways to do things. But what do you see in this next year coming with some of those funds being gone now?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   21:21
Yeah, I mean we were lucky. I'm just gonna say we were able to keep our $50 million of our housing trust fund and which we'll continue pushing out and continue. You know, hopefully we'll continue to get home and CDBG from the federal government which we also use for housing. So there's lots of advocacy going on. I'm also hopeful we can get philanthropy to step up in a meaningful way during this time period and for them to maybe rethink their priorities, even just for a couple of years. I get it. I came from. Philanthropy and I love that, you know, philanthropy has a role of piloting new ideas and helping with innovation, and I appreciate all of that work. But right now, at least we know if we don't get housing developed, people can't. Take advantage of innovation, right? They're not going to go to the museums or or, you know, get education and, you know, educational achievement as much if they don't have housing or health for that matter, or economic success. So we really need everyone to step up and even if it's just a diversion. For a couple of years till things kind of right out, you know we need that our downtowns can are going to continue to need some assistance. So reduction in place making funding is going to be painful I think across the state. So we're going to have to rethink. And one of the things that we're doing, Steve, quite honestly, is we are creating programs that aren't reliant on the state budget or the federal budget so that we can be, you know, a little bit more steady as we go. We just created it.

Steve Arwood   23:05
Smart.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   23:15
Michigan Housing Accelerator Fund, which is really just using our bond capacity to help drive down the cost of developing mixed income housing developments where you know maybe 80% is market rate and 20% is affordable. But that doesn't have to be written into anyone's budget, you know, so that we can continue to turn out and meet the state's needs, regardless of what the politics is currently looking like.

Steve Arwood   23:37
Well, that's an interesting concept because you know, you know, as you know, and I know, I mean, you know, program funding and politics and pendulum swings, right. And so people begin to get used to how things are working and how to engage the state government on projects and things change.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   23:56
Yeah.

Steve Arwood   24:04
You know, taking things outside of government or outside of, you know, that pendulum is, is, is a fantastic idea. I mean, you're known in Lansing as one of the more creative thinkers on this housing stuff. If you could, you know, put one out there that says, you know. If I had my way, I'd do this. I mean, what, what, what does that look like? And especially what might that look like for the UP? I mean, we've made some huge gains in our housing and community development in the last half a dozen years.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   24:24
Yeah. One of the programs that we are looking at right now and actually piloting in the city of Detroit, but we're already investigating how we can take this statewide, which would be particularly helpful in the UP if it's called in Detroit, the Tobias Harris Home Ownership Fund. Our program and it is a shared mortgage appreciation down payment assistance that goes up to 40% of the purchase price. It stays on as a second mortgage. No, no payments do not accrue interest. When you sell your home, you have to or refinance it. You have to repay that 40% plus the same percentage of appreciation. So if your house appreciated by 25%, you'll repay that. Let's say it's $25,000 plus 25% of the appreciation, right. What I like about this and and I think we have figured out a way that we can use the state's bonding capacity to fund it. So it won't be just in the state of or the city of Detroit. But it allows people to purchase a home wherever they want, right? So home builders can be much more aggressive about building single-family homes, knowing that Michigan families have a vehicle in which to purchase them. What I also really love about this program is you can kind of double dip. So we don't want to just put people into home ownership. We want people to stay in home ownership. So if you bought your home and you only needed 25% down to tap into that down payment assistance for 25%. And let's say you have a home repair or you have a job loss that maybe takes a couple months to get back into the market. You can come back and borrow again as long as you're under 40% and in that way your first mortgage always stays current. You're not falling into foreclosure. You kind of get back on your feet and you move forward.

Steve Arwood   27:04
Interesting, interesting. I got some sharp finance people over there and I know several of them. I mean as they look at you know how you continually refinance you know missions capacity, what any predictions on where interest rates are going to go? I mean we're still seeing.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   27:18
Yeah.

Steve Arwood   27:25
You know 7 1/2 to 8 1/2 on construction period interest in UP and I'm sure that's statewide and as you can guess that's tough. I mean in the days of four percent, 3%, I don't know if we'll see them anytime soon, I don't think things is eased as quick as people may have thought, but what, what, what, what are you guys seeing over there as you look at the markets and how you're refreshing the finance?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   27:50
You know. I think we all thought they will come down a little bit, but you never know, like predictions would say they'll come down again in the first quarter of next year, that the feds will drop probably another half percent or so and then maybe steady out for a while. What we don't know is these. You know, executive orders that come down through the federal government have had interesting impacts on the construction trades, right? Just the tariffs alone. We just, you know, one day you have it at this, the next day you do have it at that level and it presents unpredictability to the market. I don't like it, right? You can't predict that. We don't like that just thinking about entering into a contract for construction and then two months later, all of a sudden the cost of lumber has gone up by 20%. Or if you're doing a high rise in the cost of steel, you know, it escalates by 30%, right? We're seeing and so it's causing folks to charge more because there's actual additional risk. So if things would just settle down, just settle down for a little bit, I think, I think we will be.

Steve Arwood   28:52
Yeah.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   29:07
OK. And I think we'll still have some decrease. It's interesting. Who knows? I mean, the volatility with the A I stuff just today, right? And the market dropping yesterday, who saw that coming? I didn't.

Steve Arwood   29:20
Yeah, the interest on the tariffs, you're absolutely right. I mean, I hear a lot of this is you, this is the take it today price because I don't know what's going to happen next week.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   29:33
And so that's how people are writing their contracts. So how do you manage that, right? We also have this provision that actually went in under Biden, but Trump has still kept it. We call it BABA for short, but it's Build America by America. Less desirable because they create a gap because the second you use them all of a sudden now you're paying 20% more. I mean lumber's a fine example. Most of our lumber comes from Canada, not America, right that that we use in our in our construction so you know, in faucets from China, I mean it's just it is creating issues and we're actively advocating with the federal government to rethink that at least temporarily rethink it for affordable housing at least and or rethink it until we have the systems built within our country to meet those demands for those supplies.

Steve Arwood   30:51
Yeah, yeah. I mean the demand, you know, it's there's a period of time. It's like if there's a government shutdown and all of a sudden the government opens back up, it takes time to get the government open back up again. Simply reshoring takes time too, right? You know.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   31:09
That's right.

Steve Arwood   31:11
So what makes a community ready to partner with Mishka? So you have a community in the UP that is really struggling with housing issues. They want housing, they need housing. It's a community demand.
How does that community approach MISTA? What? What should they come to you with? How do you, you know, work with them to advance their plan?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   31:37
Yeah, I think it depends on where they are and what their capacity is. So if they just know, I mean a will, a will is the most important thing. Like they have a will. They want to do this housing. They're willing to come to the table. They're willing to approve those tax abatement programs or tax incentive programs that we need them to approve. That's half the battle. Like I mentioned, if they just don't even know where to start but want housing, we. We'll send someone from Great Lakes Housing Services to go and meet with them and take a look at their data. We have a housing data portal on our website, which honestly provides so much great information very easily for municipalities to get an idea of what they truly need.
And then, you know, look at their land. What do they have available? Where do they want it? Is it already zoned properly or do they need to work to get the zoning done ahead of time? We really are looking for municipalities of all sizes to allow for a more dense housing structures like allow for duplexes or fourplexes. We need those and quite honestly the demand isn't for these huge houses on a big lot. Even in rural areas you know we need to be able to do it.

Steve Arwood   32:55
Yeah.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   33:11
You know, really more density, dense, densify our housing stock because in Michigan, including in the UP, it's beautiful and people want a second home or that we have our short-term rentals. And so we don't have all the availability for our full-time residents in Michigan that we need.

Steve Arwood   33:14
Yeah.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   33:31
So we need to be a little bit more willing to think a little differently that it doesn't all have to be half acre lots for single family homes.

Steve Arwood   33:41
Well, that's interesting because you know, municipalities have, you know, vacant properties, they have tax reverted properties, they may have land bank properties. They're already sitting in a block with sewer and water and curb and St.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   33:55
Could be, yeah.

Steve Arwood   33:56
And you know, a lot of those things I always encourage, you know, don't throw away the value here. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's literally, you know, kind of right in front of you, so to speak, so.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   34:07
I mean. Right. And there are, there's a couple model cities that I would suggest people reach out to. If you reach out to the city manager of Frankfurt, the city of Frankfurt is doing all the things to get housing developed there. That's affordable for the people who live there. You know, Coastal City has. Lots of second homes there, but they're doing all the things. Also, the City of Jackson. The City of Jackson is really aggressive about attracting developers. They waive permit fees and tap fees and all the things that make things a little bit more affordable. They also reach out to developers and say, hey, we want you to come and develop housing here. We have a list at MSHDA that we share with developers and it has their contact information and where they're willing to work in the state so that you're not.

Steve Arwood   34:53
Excuse me?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   35:09
Calling somebody who's like, yeah, I only want to do work in Southeast Michigan about doing something up in, you know, the UP. But there are plenty of developers that are willing to go across the state to work. But I was talking to the gentleman in Jackson, he's like it's a part of his weekly, you know, To Do List. He sends out a couple emails to developers or returns calls to developers. Have you come and check out our land yet? Did you know? They can be a little bit more assertive about getting developers to come. And then again, take a look at our Get Housing Ready guide. It's a great map for local municipalities to use to go, OK, what do we need to do to make it easy? Uh, I should say. It's never easy, but easier to develop housing in our community, yeah.

Steve Arwood   35:55
Easy curve. Well, this is all good stuff and I guess one final thought too or and or or maybe one final question for you to developers, developers.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   36:07
Yeah.

Steve Arwood   36:12
Doing business for the first time with Mishta, we've had development interest in rehabs, you know, other activities in the Upper Peninsula. What's their best approach with Mishta? Have you not ever dealt with Mishta before?

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   36:26
Yeah, I think the best thing to do, and I say this often because it's just true, is pick up the phone and give us a call. Don't get on our website and just peruse all of our programs and think something works or something doesn't work, pick up the phone, give us a call. Even if it's an e-mail to me, I will direct them to the right person. If it's not myself, talk to us about your idea, what you're trying to do, because not only can we steer you to our right to the programs that might match their project, but we also know about other resources that they have.
Can tap into perhaps for their project as well, you know and why sometimes our programs don't work perfectly. There's always an ability to maybe get a waiver for one of our requirements. You know we are bendable.
Over at Mishta, I mean, we certainly can't break any compliance rules with the funding we get, but sometimes some of the things that we have are guidelines and you know, that's what they are, guidelines, right? And sometimes they don't work perfectly in every area, but pick up the phone, give us a call.

Steve Arwood   37:30
Great. Well, we really appreciate your time today. You do important work. We want you to know that at any time you wish to come across the bridge and continue to spend some time with our communities and our developers, you're most welcome. So any final thoughts?
Before we conclude.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   37:58
You know, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for the time. Thank you for highlighting what we're doing at Mishta and for everything that Invest UP is doing. We're seeing just, you know, a big increase in projects up there. Often when I go to visit one of our projects, your logo is on there too. And that's because we're working together to help make these things happen. And you know, I wish every part of our state had an Invest UP type organization to really help get things done. So thank you.

Steve Arwood   38:30
Thank you. Have a wonderful day and a happy Thanksgiving and holiday season.

Hovey, Amy (MSHDA)   38:36
Thanks, you too. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Steve Arwood   38:38
Take care. Bye-bye.