Congratulations to Loretta Hiner, Senior Housing Analyst with the City of St. Louis Affordable Housing Commission, recipient of our 2019 Award for Excellence in the Public Sector!
The Award for Excellence in the Public Sector recognizes an individual, government, quasi-government agency, or tax-supported entity that:
Develops or protects policy that supports investment in communities.
Demonstrates innovative use of resources for community improvement.
Is proactive, persistent, professional, and efficient in finding ways to support community building initiatives.
Humans of St. Louis storyteller Maleeha Samer sat down with Loretta to learn more about her work and experiences. Here’s some of what they talked about.
Loretta Hiner
“When I first started this work, I was focused on what I needed to do and what my responsibilities were. I didn't realize the interconnectedness. Now I see that I’m just one little piece in this much larger pie. And instead of fighting for a slice of pie, I see us making it a bigger pie. Playing off our strengths together, we are all working for a much greater good. It could be people working together to get a city swimming pool open in the mornings. It could be people working together to create traffic calming techniques and to make roads safe for pedestrians and bicyclists. It could be people realizing that they want to live in a community that’s clean and safe, so they start to pick up the trash. Or people looking out for where they live, demanding more, and taking the first step to make it the way they want to make it. When people realize the power within themselves and start using that power, we all see a new exponential strength that we sometimes didn’t even know we had.”
- Loretta Hiner, Senior Housing Analyst with the City of St. Louis Affordable Housing Commission
Loretta Hiner
“There’s a project called East Fox Homes, started by a church in the South Grand area, with a lot of refugee and immigrant congregants who were being priced out of their housing. The church paired up with a nonprofit organization and started identifying a number of vacant and dilapidated houses around the Gravois Park neighborhood, and acquired them. They submitted a multilayered finance project to us, of which we were one funder, to rehab a number of historic structures and convert them into affordable rental housing. At the ribbon cutting, I remember seeing representatives from all the different funders coming together and seeing what it took to get that project done. The church and the nonprofit created a living example in which these units, for the next 30 years, will be able to house generations of people who will no longer be cost-burdened by the price of housing. The new residents have a stake in the community, and they’ll be able to retain more of their income. Now they have firmly established that they belong in the neighborhood and that this is their home.”
- Loretta Hiner, Senior Housing Analyst with the City of St. Louis Affordable Housing Commission
We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like Loretta at our 7th Annual Community Building Awards on April 11!
Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Maleeha Samer. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
