Hello everyone and welcome to today's Tuesday tip. Today we're going to be taking a look at a brief fair housing checkup you can do to make sure the key elements of your fair housing compliance are where they need to be. Key areas to watch when you're checking your fair housing compliance include your signage, your advertising, your communication with residents and the public.

Reasonable accommodation frameworks, your limited English proficiency plan, and VAWA requirements. With signage, the first thing you want to look at is is your signage clear, readable, up to date? For instance, you can see the slide on the left, that signage is not clear, it's kind of run down, letters are missing. You don't want to have your signs look like that. You want all the logos and the words to be clear to anyone coming onto your property.

Also one thing to watch is if you have fair housing information on your bulletin boards, make sure it's not covered up by other things. And that's true of anything important that you post for your residents, like emergency plans or selection plans or anything that they really should know is there and be able to read clearly.

With your advertising, first of all, make sure that you are doing your advertising as required by your marketing plan. It is a common misconception that if you have lots of applicants on the wait list, you don't need to be advertising. That is not true. Your affirmative fair housing marketing needs to be done in accordance with that.

plan as long as that wait list is open. If the wait list is closed and you followed HUD's requirements for closing the wait list, then you don't need to mark. But as long as any wait list is open, that list or lists need to be advertised for. Be careful you are using


Current wording in your advertising. Don't use outdated terms or terms that may imply a bias for or against a protected class. And be careful of the images you use. Sometimes images of people can be a poor choice in that if they see all people of one ethnic group in an ad, they may assume that their particular ethnic group is not welcome.

With the fair housing logo, make sure you're using the whole logo with the words, spell out equal housing opportunity and don't just use EHO. HUD has determined that that's not necessarily clear to people outside the industry.

With your communications, make sure you're training all of your staff in fair housing. Now everybody doesn't necessarily have to be trained to the same degree, but even if you have, say, a resident who volunteers answering phones, you need to make sure that that resident knows exactly what they can and cannot say answering the phone. Or your maintenance staff is going to need to know what they can and cannot say to residents.

Make sure you have scripts at your property. It's not required by HUD, but it's a great way to ensure that everybody says the same thing every time and knows what they can and cannot or should and should not be saying. Make sure that you are documenting everything at your property, who you talked to, what was said, date, time, all of that stuff, especially if it's a fair housing matter. Have written handouts that can avoid confusion.

Things like reasonable accommodations, the VAWA handouts that HUD has, but you could also have other things that maybe aren't as clear at your property. Things like reasonable accommodation policies are a great thing to have in a written handout to give to residents. And beware of limited English proficiency and accessibility needs that may impact your communication with your residents, applicants, and others. Reasonable accommodations.


And we have an example of a reasonable accommodation that anybody in senior housing is used to doing quite frequently. That is a tub cut. Make sure that with your reasonable accommodations, you are following your established procedures, that you're communicating clearly in terms of where things stand, what you can do, what you can't do, and make sure that you're focusing on that what you can do. Always come across to your residents and applicants.

with a positive attitude that you're looking to resolve the issue. So you're looking for what you can do. You want to avoid giving the impression that you're looking to avoid making an accommodation. And make sure that staff can recognize a request. Sometimes these come across a little less formally. For instance, a resident mentioning to your maintenance staff that they had to walk really far to get into the building on a particular day and their legs are bothering them.

That maintenance person should know to bring that to the manager's attention because that can be kind of a casual request for assistance.

Make sure that you're following your LEP plan. Make sure that you have a way to talk to people and communicate with people who may not be able to speak English clearly or understand English. Remember that although the administration has changed kind of the way it looks at how we meet the LEP requirements, laws have not changed. So we're still required to make sure that people without

And English proficiency can understand important elements of tenancy. Know the languages that are spoken at your property and make those a priority. Know your area resources in terms of, say, maybe ethnic clubs or colleges or other things and groups that may be able to help you provide translation assistance, and know your property's LEP plan.


Each property is going to have its own plan in terms of how it responds to people who don't have English as their first language. And it's important to make sure you're following that. Also with VAWA, make sure that you have updated your emergency transfer plan, that you know what it says. Make sure that you're providing notices and putting up postings as required. Be aware of the new forms that came out. The expiration date on those is January 31st of 2028.

So make sure that you're using the latest forms. And you can find those at hud.gov slash vawa.

Don't forget that with all of the changes we've seen in the administration's priorities, there's been notices about LEP, there's been notices about fair housing and ESAs. Just because the administration is making changes to their administrative protocols, that does not mean that the law has changed. So you're still subject to fair housing law, you're still subject to section 504, none of that has changed.

And it's important that you remember you still need to adhere to your obligations. Some resources for information on what we talked about today. HUDS 4350.3 Chapter 2, the HUD.gov Fair Housing F E G O pages, and your state Fair Housing Enforcement Agency are all great sources of information. So that's going to do it for today. We'd love to know what you would like to see on the next Tuesday tips.

So please let us know. You can email Mary and me directly at the email addresses on your screen, or you can go to the Navigate webpage and contact us through the contact us link. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you on the next one.