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Andrew Ragali is a manager with HAI Group's Marketing and Communications Department. His core focus is the development of compelling and informative content to help HAI Group's clients navigate insurance and risk management in the affordable housing industry. Send Andrew your ideas, questions, and thoughts: aragali@housingcenter.com
While vandalism incidents may seem trivial compared to violent crime, they still come at a potentially high cost to affordable housing organizations. Repeated vandalism incidents can harm an organization’s reputation and could lead to more serious crimes.
Affordable housing organizations rehabilitating aging residential properties or building new developments are exposed to new risks, including the potential for fire on a construction site.
In the realm of commercial insurance, terms like "vacant" and "unoccupied" hold specific meanings, especially in the context of residential buildings. While they may appear synonymous at first glance, their distinctions are crucial and have significant implications for property insurance. Let’s delve deeper into these definitions and their insurance ramifications.
If an emergency strikes, does your housing organization have a plan in place to remain operational, or is the development of a business continuity plan stuck on the back burner?
No matter your answer, HAI Group is here to help. We've developed a tool to guide your organization through creating a customized business continuity plan (BCP). Watch the video below for a step-by-step overview, or keep reading to learn more!
Not every structure fire can be prevented—there’s a reason nearly every town, no matter how small, has a dedicated career or volunteer fire department. But there are proven steps public and affordable housing organizations can take to reduce the risk of fires and ensure residents, visitors, and staff remain safe if a fire does occur.
Poverty conditions don’t invariably lead to more fires but do present certain risk factors that should be addressed on a community-by-community basis, according to a National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) research report published in 2021. The report cites several studies conducted over the last five decades that have made the connection between poverty and elevated fire risk.
Keeping information safe and secure is a challenging development for businesses of all sizes over the last few years, including public and affordable housing organizations. Expeditious shifts from in-person to online to hybrid workplaces forced companies to change, or at least reexamine, their cybersecurity practices and protocols, and far too often they weren’t prepared.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, now in its 19th year. So why should you—someone working in the housing industry—care about cybersecurity? Public and affordable organizations are being breached by cybercriminals with increasing frequency.
The staff at Denver Housing Authority (DHA) weren't blind to the possibility of a cyberattack.
In fact, staff had taken steps in 2021 to address the organization's cybersecurity vulnerabilities, said Jim DiPaolo, DHA's deputy CFO. But in September 2021, disaster struck—DHA was completely locked out of the files and systems it relies on due to a ransomware attack.
"We had a fairly good business continuity plan," DiPaolo said during a June 2022 interview with HAI Group. "We were backing up our systems, and felt that we had a fairly strong [cybersecurity] program that wasn't going to be open to this type of threat."
At HAI Group, we define risk as the existence of uncertainty regarding a future loss. The “uncertainty” is an event that can occur and, in the case of a housing organization, adversely affect its objectives, mission, vision, or bottom line.
