Women have a large presence in affordable housing. They’re developers, policymakers, advocates, and finance executives. Their overall numbers may not be large, but their impact is huge.
In recognition of that fact, Affordable Housing Finance, for the second year, profiles 10 women who are shaking up the industry, taking on the challenges of turning empty land into homes, assembling billions of dollars in funding, and pushing for key policy changes.
While women are gaining ground in the male-dominated field of real estate, the majority still experience advancement barriers, including gender bias, according to a white paper released by the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network at the end of 2016. Women in the study reported that a lack of mentorship is their No. 1 barrier to success.
We asked several of this year’s influential women to share their best career advice. Their widsom is good for men and women alike.
“It’s the same advice I give to my daughters: Keep pushing and make someone else tell you no,” says Joan Dawson McConnon, co-founder of Philadelphia’s Project HOME. “Find a way to break down the barrier.”
“You have to have flexibility and creativity because there is a science to affordable housing, but there’s also a lot of art to it. Whether it’s affordable housing for the nonhomeless or folks experiencing homelessness, it has to be centered around the person. It has to be rooted in dignity of the human person, their potential, and their vision for themselves.”
To succeed in this field, one can’t take shortcuts when it comes to knowledge, notes another.
“If you don’t have the hard skills, such as finance, accounting, and economics, you should really take time to go get them,” says Mary Tingerthal, head of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency. “If you don’t have those skills, you won’t have the same ability … to understand how affordable housing fits within the larger housing industry.”
Several women echoed the importance of doing a job you love.
“Do what you love—follow your path,” says Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “The more you’re able to align your work with your deepest values and goals, the greater your impact.”
Tracy Doran
The nonprofit Humanities Foundation has developed more than 2,000 affordable homes in the Southeast, with hundreds more in its pipeline.
Creating housing for low-income seniors and families has been the organization’s mission, but president Tracy Doran has grown Humanities to do even more.
Doran sees the big picture as well as anyone in the industry. That’s why she’s taking on the related issues of food insecurity and health care for residents.
Since 2014, Humanities has delivered 400,000 pounds of food to people living in its developments. It always had small pantries at its properties, but the team recognized that it needed to do more.
“We saw that many of our residents, especially seniors, were struggling to meet their bills, and they would give up food to pay for other items,” Doran says. “We said that’s a place where we can really supplement and help them.”
Humanities has partnered with local food banks and churches to deliver fresh produce, frozen meat, and other staples to residents every other week. Previously available only to properties in its home state of South Carolina, the program has been expanded. Almost half of the food has been delivered to Humanities’ properties in Virginia. Deliveries are also made to a senior housing community in Georgia.
“It’s a direct infusion of capital into that household,” says Doran, who founded the organization in 1992 with her husband, Bob, who leads the James Doran Co., a real estate investment and development firm. Tracy worked with Bob on his deals and was well familiar with the business.
Wanting to give back to their community, they had volunteered to help build a single-room occupancy development in Charleston, S.C.
“About half of the people who were living in the homeless shelter were working full time, but they made low wages and couldn’t afford the set-up costs to go into an apartment,” says Doran. “The cost of living was high.”
Through that experience, the couple saw the need for a nonprofit that understood how to develop and finance affordable housing.
The active family also owns St. Jude Farms, a sustainable oyster farm and aquaculture business in South Carolina’s ACE Basin. The company has been a partner in the food pantry program, with its refrigerated trucks helping to make deliveries to the affordable housing communities.
Another major program that Humanities has started is a telehealth program for its senior residents. The organization, which has about 400 seniors in Charleston alone, recognized that many of them have chronic or serious illnesses, says Doran, who worked as a nurse for 13 years.
As a result, Humanities has teamed with Medical University of South Carolina to provide telehealth monitoring and in-person visits to several of its affordable housing developments, including a senior development in Georgia. “We’re monitoring and keeping up with folks who have illnesses before things get bad,” Doran says. “We can help people manage their chronic illnesses, stay healthier, and age in place to be able to live longer in their independent housing.”
There’s also more affordable housing that needs to be built. Humanities received an impressive three low-income housing tax credit awards to build 302 more affordable housing units in Virginia in 2016. That will add to the six projects that the group has completed and two it has under construction in the state.
Nancy O. Andrews
Nancy O. Andrews has invested billions of dollars into low-income communities across the nation.
Her work includes financing affordable housing, charter schools, child-care centers, and other key community facilities.
“We have a poverty-alleviation mission,” says Andrews, president and CEO of the San Francisco-based Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) for the past 18 years. “We see housing as one of the most important steps that enable families to move up the economic ladder. It’s been an enormous part of our history, our present, and our future.”
Overall, LIIF has invested more than $2 billion into poor communities, including more than $1 billion to support 70,000 homes, which have largely been multifamily housing developments, many funded with low-income housing tax credits.
The work continues. In 2016, LIIF, a community development financial institution, received $85 million in New Markets Tax Credits and a $3.7 million Capital Magnet Fund award from federal officials that it is investing into low-income communities.
More than just a funding source, Andrews and her organization are thought leaders in the industry, looking at the role housing plays in supporting healthy, vibrant communities and its connection to all aspects of a person’s life, including education and health. LIIF, in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, recently launched Equity with a Twist, a $6 million social capital fund to encourage housing and community developers to take on the hard job of integrating education and health into their work.
LIIF also created the Social Impact Calculator, a first-of-its-kind online tool that assesses the social impact of affordable housing and other community investments. The calculator helps put a dollar value on the benefits of things like an affordable home, a great school, or access to transit.
Housing has long been a focus for Andrews, who began her career as a community organizer in Salt Lake City. “I came in through tenants’ rights and advocating for housing legislation and housing funding,” she says. “I began to realize that the only way that I could do responsible public policy and advocacy was to understand how the financing works and how the economy of the housing market worked.”
Andrews serves on numerous advisory boards including the board of the National Housing Law Project and the advisory councils of several financial institutions, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. In 2016, she was named to Living Cities’ 25 Disruptive Leaders list for improving economic outcomes for low-income people.
Debbie Burkart
Debbie Burkart has helped finance thousands of affordable homes for special-needs residents across the country.
National vice president of supportive housing at the National Equity Fund (NEF), she has steered more than $800 million in low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) equity to developments serving veterans, homeless, and disabled individuals.
A passionate advocate for veterans housing, Burkart also serves as the director of Bring Them HOMES, an initiative launched by the Local Initiatives Support Corp. and NEF in 2012 in partnership with Citi Community Development, MetLife Foundation, and Northrop Grumman. Since then, the effort has raised $4.3 million, which includes $4 million in grants, to help build more than 60 developments with approximately 4,300 homes for homeless veterans and their families.
“Life is unpredictable and brings moments of suffering. No one is immune,” says Burkart. “We gather strength from our community and family to overcome life’s challenges. But not everyone has the same support network. It has been important to me, someone who has benefited from a safety net, to build one for others who do not, for any number of reasons, have access to a supportive community. To build housing where people can heal and receive services or design supports in their units to help them live independently again. Our veterans who have suffered, persons who are born or develop disabilities, I have seen healed by living in supportive housing and find hope again.”
In addition to financing and underwriting deals at NEF, Burkart works on policy issues related to supportive housing, including advocating for federal funding, project-based rent subsidies, and the use of vacant land owned by the Department of Veterans Affairs for housing.
Burkart has been at NEF, a nonprofit LIHTC syndicator, for 25 years. Seeing how residents are uplifted by supportive housing has been especially rewarding.
“There have been so many moments at grand openings where the residents speak about their struggles and how the affordable housing was a turning point in their lives,” she says. “Where the formerly homeless veteran says he is living now with his brothers and his sisters. Where the LGBTQ youth with mental illness, who had no family support, says she has found a new family in the community at the transition-age youth housing. The frail senior who was a shut-in because she couldn’t climb down the apartment building’s stairs of her former residence, saying Wii bowling is a favorite activity at her new affordable assisted living. I just wish it didn’t take so long to build these projects.”
She serves on several boards, including LA Family Housing, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and CSH (Corporation for Supportive Housing). This allows her to bring her expertise to the organization and to further her own education.
For her work on veterans housing, Burkart received the Corporate Silver Star Award from Volunteers of America Illinois in 2016 and the Community Hero Award from New Directions in 2011.
Robin Hughes
Robin Hughes found her calling working with community-based organizations to bring affordable housing and critical resources, such as health care, child care, and retail, to communities that suffered from disinvestment.
She has been actively involved in community development and affordable housing for over 30 years in both the private and public sectors, including early stops at Citibank, The Richman Group of Companies, the Community Development Commission of the County of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office. For the past two decades, she has served as president and CEO of Los Angeles–based Abode Communities, a nonprofit focused on the development of affordable housing, architecture, property management, and resident services.
Hughes and her organization are key players in making the high-cost Southern California market affordable to working and low-income families.
"The positive change that we have on the lives of people and throughout our communities is what keeps me motivated," says Hughes. "Affordable housing plays a significant role in achieving social and economic progress, and creating this justice is extremely important to me."
As head of Abode Communities, she has greatly grown both the corporate and portfolio sides. Approaching its 50th anniversary, the organization has developed nearly 45 properties with more than 2,700 homes for 8,000 low-income people, two-thirds of which were developed under her leadership. It also boasts approximately 150 employees with a corporate operating budget of just over $14 million.
Hughes has initiated many changes over the years, starting by bringing property management in-house and then creating a comprehensive resident services program. In addition, the nonprofit has expanded its geographic footprint outside of Los Angeles, working from Santa Barbara down to San Diego, and has made significant commitments to sustainability.
Over the years, the firm has continued to focus on the production of affordable housing but also has incorporated other types of housing into its portfolio, including units serving special-needs populations, such as the chronically homeless, survivors of domestic violence, transition-age youths, and school district employees.
"We've also added community facilities, such as early education centers and health-care centers, to take a more holistic approach to community development," she says.
2017 is expected to be a big year for Abode Communities, with nearly 970 apartment homes under construction amongst new construction, acquisition-rehab, and repositioning of existing properties.
"It's the highest production level we have had in my tenure," says Hughes
Current projects include a $69 million transit-oriented affordable housing development with a federally qualified health center and community-serving retail in South Los Angeles; the rehab of American Gold Star Manor, 348 affordable homes for seniors and veterans in Long Beach; and the $71 million redevelopment of the fourth and final phase of a former public housing site featuring 176 affordable family homes in Wilmington in partnership with Mercy Housing California.
Sarah Laubinger
Sarah Laubinger has moved up the ranks at Boston Financial Investment Management (BFIM).
Hired as an investment analyst in 1997, she learned the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) business by starting with the basics of underwriting. Laubinger later became an acquisitions officer and was responsible for originating and placing more than 400 properties. Since 2013, she has co-lead BFIM’s equity syndication efforts with Greg Voyentzie. Together, they have joint responsibility for the strategic direction of the firm’s syndication team.
Laubinger says the most rewarding aspect of her job is knowing that she is working with others to create safe, attractive affordable housing for families, seniors, veterans, and people with special needs.
“I feel so strongly that affordable housing is among the most important investments our country can make,” says Laubinger, executive vice president. “Stability starts at home, and all Americans deserve access to a decent place to live. Homelessness and rent burden can be paralyzing.”
Over the years, BFIM has invested in a variety of affordable and historic housing developments, including nearly $2 billion in LIHTC equity in just the past four years alone. Laubinger received a 2016 Tsongas Award honoring women in preservation from Preservation Massachusetts for her efforts in contributing more than $250 million of equity to the redevelopment of more than 30 historic properties that have been rehabilitated to provide approximately 2,000 affordable homes.
BFIM holds a seat on the board of the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition and is a member of the Housing Advisory Group. Both organizations play an important role in the industry as they advocate for the LIHTC program. Their voices will be especially important this year, as they focus their outreach efforts to the new administration and members of Congress, according to Laubinger.
“As a 20-year industry veteran, I’ve seen how the public and private partnership afforded under the LIHTC can fuel the quality and reality of successful affordable housing,” she says. “The LIHTC pairs public and private resources—infusing institutional grade equity and investment standards into what otherwise would be solely public financed and regulated housing.”
Joan Dawson McConnon
When Joan Dawson McConnon was in high school, homelessness was hitting an epidemic level. Living in a family rooted in commitment to others, she says she couldn’t accept that society would let people sleep on the streets.
After graduating from Penn State University with a degree in accounting, she moved around for various jobs and volunteered helping the homeless in those communities. But it was when she moved back to Philadelphia that her volunteer work reached the next level.
She started doing street outreach and met Sister Mary Scullion. The two opened a winter emergency shelter in January 1989 and ran it through Easter.
“What we learned in that winter was that many people wanted to come off the streets permanently and wanted to recover, but once they took that first step there was no permanent place, only shelter,” she says. “That really posed the question of what was the purpose. They understood they had a warm place for the winter, but it wasn’t a permanent solution for anyone. That summer we thought about what we could do that could be permanent.”
The two co-founded the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Project HOME, which focuses on more than just housing. HOME stands for housing, opportunities to work, medical care, and education. And for the past almost 28 years, it has been tackling homelessness in this holistic manner.
“We continue to stay rooted in HOME, and every day take a step, two steps, whatever we can to drive those services with the intent that we want to be the first major city to end chronic homelessness in our country,” says McConnon, who serves as the nonprofit’s associate executive director and CFO.
Project HOME has an active year ahead. Its 2415 North Broad Street development is expected to be completed this summer and will provide 88 units of affordable housing for the city. It also plans to start construction this spring on a 30-unit affordable housing development that will be LGBTQ-friendly for young adults.
It also will continue to deepen and broaden its work to get veterans and other formerly homeless individuals back into the workforce. In addition, it’s expanding its health-care initiatives to tackle the opioid epidemic in the community and looking at ways to enhance its college access, K-8, and teen programs.
“People do come off the streets and thrive permanently. This is solvable. If we can garner the political will and the moral will, we could end this, no doubt in my mind,” she says. “We know the solutions, we know what it takes. We have witnessed it every year over the last 28 years. We do not have to have people living on our streets, the way it’s happening today. It’s still unacceptable to me.”
Michelle Norris
When Michelle Norris started her career in the finance department at National Church Residences in 1993, she didn’t know anything about the organization but knew it was where she wanted to work after seeing its tagline: compassion with professionalism.
“I knew that I was going to be a working mom for a very long time, and I wanted to do something that I could tell my daughter I was proud of,” she says.
It wasn’t long before she also knew she wanted to be more involved in the Columbus, Ohio–based nonprofit’s day-to-day field operations after attending the grand opening for Abbey Church Village, one of the firm’s new low-income housing tax credit projects at the time.
“Within about a year, I was so in love with the work of the field team,” she says, adding that for her first three years at the organization she had three different jobs working her way closer and closer to operations.
After five years in operations, she moved over to the development side, where she led the creation of a number of cutting-edge projects. She was named president of National Church Residences Investment Corp. in 2014, and a year ago, she was promoted to executive vice president of external affairs and strategic initiatives, a new position to help guide the nonprofit’s mission toward greater focus, impact, and investment.
“My work is very broad now around all of our growth strategies—developing, buying, expanding our senior living campuses, and service agencies,” Norris says. “I work with all the senior team to move these initiatives forward. It’s really different to be across all the business lines. It’s fun to be looking at the whole spectrum.”
The nation’s largest nonprofit provider of affordable senior housing and services, National Church Residences kicked off its new five-year plan in July with plans to continue to grow its affordable housing through acquisitions and new development as well as to examine how it is serving the communities around its developments.
“Especially in the senior space, we cannot build our way fast enough to good solutions. Affordable housing is the key foundation, but there’s going to be more folks looking for housing,” says Norris. “Our long-term goal is to touch as many lives outside of our buildings as inside our buildings.”
That means reaching another 20,000 people in the communities outside its buildings. Norris says the nonprofit plans to achieve this goal by growing its home health-care and hospice programs.
She also remains active helping to further senior housing on the local, state, and federal levels. One priority has been to ensure the preservation of Sec. 202 project rental assistance contract properties. She also has been part of a LeadingAge task force for the past two years to create a proposal for a new Department of Housing and Urban Development–administered program, Service-Enriched Affordable Living.
And, in a case of life coming full circle, the development that made Norris realize she wanted to be more involved, Abbey Church Village, has been refinanced with the rehab slated for completion this summer.
“That was the building for me,” she says. “I’m watching it get rebirthed with a new and intensive focus on families. I couldn’t be prouder.”
Ali Solis
Ali Solis is putting a face on the nation’s rental housing crisis.
President and CEO of the nonprofit Make Room, she tells the stories of struggling renters, from a single mother trying to make it until her next paycheck in Erie, Pa., to a working family trying to cope with rising rents in Los Angeles.
“We humanize the impact that the rental housing crisis is having on over 11 million households, exposing that suffering and the societal cost of inaction” says Solis.
At the same time, Make Room is about more than sharing stories. Through its digital tools and live events, it connects renters, policymakers, and the public with key information about local housing markets and advocates for better housing policies.
It was recently involved in helping Denver pass its first dedicated fund for affordable housing that will raise $150 million over the next 10 years to create or preserve 6,000 affordable homes.
Make Room launched in 2015, with Enterprise Community Partners as the founding sponsor and support from partners such as The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and the Ford Foundation.
Make Room’s eye-opening efforts have included a series of “Concerts for the First”—the day the rent is due—which featured Carly Rae Jepsen, Miguel, and other musicians visiting with renters and performing in their living rooms.
Solis has big plans for this year, which ushers in a new administration and Congress as well state and local leaders around the country. “We have a lot of work to do to educate the new policymakers about the rental housing crisis,” says the industry veteran.
Make Room is planning to tour the country this summer to collect more real-life stories about the rental housing crisis and explore solutions.
“The work is more important than ever,” says Solis, the daughter of two immigrants—her father hails from the Basque region of Spain and her mother is from Puerto Rico.
Until recently, Solis served as senior vice president, advocacy and corporate affairs, at Enterprise, an organization that she joined in 2000 as director of congressional outreach.
Solis serves on the advisory boards of the Urban Land Institute Terwilliger Center for Housing and the Moelis Institute for Affordable Housing Policy at New York University’s Furman Center. She was awarded a 2015 Stevie Award for Women in Business, Executive of the Year for Nonprofit/Government. She has also been named to Hispanic Business’s 50 Influentials list.
Mary Tingerthal
Mary Tingerthal was the 13th employee at the newly formed Minnesota Housing Finance Agency in the mid-1970s. She spent a decade helping to create and run the agency’s home improvement lending program, and then she decided to leave to attend graduate school.
After that, her career took a lot of twists and turns, but her various jobs over the years prepared her to return to lead Minnesota Housing in 2011, when she was appointed commissioner by Gov. Mark Dayton.
“It allows me to make use of every job I have ever had in affordable housing,” Tingerthal says.
Through the years, she spent time in the private and public sector, working for familiar names in the affordable housing business. She had two stints at what became GMAC Residential Funding and worked for the city of St. Paul when the low-income housing credit (LIHTC) was being implemented, getting her first taste of underwriting developments and allocating credits when there hardly were any investors.
She has been one of only three CEOs to lead National Equity Fund, one of the nation’s largest LIHTC syndicators, and worked with New Markets Tax Credits at the Community Reinvestment Fund, one of the early allocatees for the funds. She also worked at the Housing Partnership Network, a business alliance of some of the nation’s largest nonprofits.
And then six years ago she returned to her former stomping grounds.
“I like to say my timing was perfect for coming back to Minnesota Housing. It was after the recession, and we had nowhere to go but up,” she says.
She credits the governor and legislature for their willingness to support affordable housing. In 2012, Minnesota Housing received $35 million in bonds to be used for housing and homeless programs.
“That has stepped up our ability to do supportive housing and preservation transactions for preserving federally assisted housing,” she says. “We did so well with the first allocation that we received authorization for $100 million in the same kind of bonding authority in 2014, then another $10 million after that. The amount of dollars that we’ve been able to attract to affordable housing, we haven’t seen this level since the mid-1980s.”
She also is proud of the strides made on the homeownership side. When she returned to Minnesota Housing, the agency started taking steps to rethink its single-family mortgage lending business and grow its downpayment assistance program.
“We were able to capitalize on the fact that the market was very hungry for single-family mortgage financing that came with downpayment assistance.”
Minnesota Housing also is working to reach out to households of color and help them become homeowners. In 2016, 32% of the loans that the agency made went to households of color compared with 11% for traditional mortgage lending.
However, there’s still a lot of work ahead for Tingerthal. “The one frustration for me is that even though we’ve mobilized a lot of resources, affordability is a bigger problem today that it was when I started.”
Diane Yentel
Diane Yentel fights to house the lowest-income people.
In 2016, she became president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an organization that educates and advocates to ensure that everyone has a home. It’s a new job but not a new cause for Yentel.
After college, she lived and worked for three years in rural Zambia as a Peace Corps volunteer, where she witnessed both deep poverty and great resilience. “I learned that, however humble the structure, the safety and security of a home was literally the foundation for all other possibilities in life,” she says.
When Yentel returned home, she worked on a national research study about the impacts of welfare reform on low-income women. “Each month, I interviewed the women in their homes, where they told me about their struggles to make ends meet. The difference that affordable housing made in their lives was clear. Those without it lived in constant fear of being evicted—and often they were—because despite their sacrifices and struggles they still couldn’t get ahead, stay ahead, and pay the rent.”
She went on earn a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas, concentrating on the systemic change needed to end poverty. Her first job out of graduate school was at the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, and she’s been working toward ending homelessness and housing poverty ever since. Prior to joining NLIHC, Yentel was vice president of public policy and government affairs at Enterprise Community Partners, where she led its federal, state, and local policy, research and advocacy programs.
Washington, D.C.–based NLIHC’s work includes its signature “Out of Reach” report, an annual look at the disparity between rental housing costs and renter income across the country. The organization has also been at the forefront in advocating for the National Housing Trust Fund. In 2017, it will continue to have a full agenda, working to safeguard and improve existing Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs and other resources and seizing opportunities to expand them, according to Yentel.
“Four years of 'holding the line' with level funding, of maintaining the status quo simply won't do, not for the nearly 8 million extremely low-income households struggling to pay the rent each month; for the hundreds of thousands of families, elderly people, kids, and veterans living in shelters or on the streets; or for the over 5 million households receiving HUD-subsidized assistance and wanting access to better and healthier units, better paying jobs, better schools for their kids and ways to save some of their limited income for something more,” Yentel says.