United States Department of the Treasury HAF Annual Report

Submitted by Dina Levy New York - HAF AR 2022

1. Have you coordinated with any of these agencies? (FHA, VA, USDA, GSE's, State or Local Agencies that hold mortgage portfolios)? Yes

2. Please quantify the total amount of funds spent on outreach. $ 2,228,094.00

3. You identified the Community-based Organizations listed below in your HAF Participant Plan or a previous report. Please indicate whether or not you have performed outreach to these organizations using the checkboxes in the "Outreach Performed" column.

PERFORMANCE GOALS

METHODS FOR TARGETING

1. Please provide an update on your targeting plan including challenges, successes, etc. As stated, out targeting for this program was largely done prior to launch and during the first 6 weeks that the program was open. Much of our focus was on reaching SDI communities, and harder to reach homeowners including cooperators, manufactured homeowners, folks with limited technology access including seniors, and communities where English is not the primary language. While we feel that our efforts were highly successful in most areas, we did run into some challenges. Our applicant pools is well over the 40% goal of meeting the definition Socially Disadvantaged. The number of cooperators who applied from very low-income parts of the state also exceeded our expectations, and the number of seniors who applied (particularly for tax arrears) also exceeded our expectations. And while we did have good representation in terms of applications from all ten regions across New York State, we did not get the number of applications from manufactured home park residents that we had anticipated.

2. Is the targeting plan put fourth in the HAF Plan achieving the desired results? Yes

BEST PRACTICES AND COORDINATION

1. Have you coordinated with any of these agencies? (FHA, VA, USDA, GSE's, State or Local Agencies that hold mortgage portfolios) Yes. Through our participation in the NCSHA network and those opportunities organized by the HAF Treasury team we have had regular meetings with FHA, Fannie and Freddie. We have also had NY specific meetings with the GSEs in the lead up to launching the program in order to inform our policy, specifically towards designing our policies on loss mitigation for federally backed mortgages. In addition NYS HCR who manages HAF also oversees the State of New York Mortgage Agency (SONYMA) and we have coordinated internally for any applicants who applied to NYS HAF who also have a loan held by SONYMA.

2. Have you coordinated with servicers? Yes. While this aspect is probably the most challenging from a production standpoint, there are three tracks we have taken that have proved successful in advancing the program in coordination with servicers:

1. The engagement of the NYS Attorney General and the network of legal services and housing counseling agencies (HOPP) had enabled us to expedite many cases where servicer engagement was necessary to either decision or close out a case.

2. NYS HAF assigned a team of 6 program staff which we call "captains" who are each assigned a large number of servicers with whom they have built relationships and most importantly scheduled weekly check-ins to go over all cases that are outstanding or running into CDF issues.

3. Participation with the Housing Policy Counsel and NCSHA has been very helpful in working though some higher level policy questions that are not case specific but which do have impact on the efficacy of our program.