About

Housing Partnership Network (HPN) is an award-winning business collaborative of 100+ of the nation’s leading housing and community development organizations. Though we are a member driven network at our core, HPN is not a typical association or intermediary. We’re inventors, doers, and social entrepreneurs.

HPN facilitates peer-to-peer learning and promotes policy and practice that is based on the proven experience of some of the nation’s most successful nonprofits. Through our unique networked approach, organizations and leaders accelerate and scale innovation to more rapidly respond to changing market challenges and opportunities. Together, we have created and operate a family of social enterprises that strengthen the business performance and social impact of our members.

Below, affordable housing CEOs and funding partners describe the transformative power of being a member of the Housing Partnership Network -- including our President & CEO, Robin Hughes.

Our mission is to leverage the individual strengths and mobilize the collective power of our member organizations to bring innovative solutions to America’s affordable housing and community development sectors. We do this through practitioner-driven peer exchange to deliver creative housing policy, programs, and financing to our network members.

Our vision is that all people live in vibrant, inclusive, healthy communities where access to safe, affordable, and sustainable homes creates opportunity, wealth building, and economic mobility.

Housing Partnership Network (HPN) recognizes the extensive body of evidence that race and ethnicity fundamentally shape the experiences of individuals in society and the economy in the United States, including in the housing and financial services markets. These impacts are compounded for individuals with low incomes and little wealth. Today, there are large disparities in social and economic outcomes between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., including with respect to wealth, homeownership and access to quality affordable housing. HPN recognizes that sharp social and economic inequalities resulted from long-term, legally created and enforced segregation in housing among other aspects of society.

HPN understands that, for much of U.S. history, federal, state and local laws required the division of the nation’s economy and broader society along racial and ethnic lines and were often enforced with violence. These included the legal institution of slavery, forced relocation of Native Americans, Jim Crow laws, the Japanese American internments, Operation Wetback, the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s role in de jure housing segregation, and many others. HPN recognizes that, even as legal race-based discrimination was dismantled over the course of the second half of the 20th century, the damage remains deeply seated in our society and must be addressed. The legacy of these policies and practices has led to persistent racial disparities in wealth, health, and opportunity, with formerly redlined areas experiencing segregation, substandard housing, and limited access to resources, even after these practices were outlawed. HPN also believes that our country suffers a grave economic consequence in terms of lost productivity and growth by failing to improve upon the status quo.

In recent decades, we have seen intentional and effective efforts to address the negative impacts of historic de jure and de facto discrimination. Providing equitable access to opportunity requires considering the generational impacts or continued bias that might impede an individual’s access. While a person’s race and ethnicity do not fully describe a person’s experience in U.S. society, they remain an important predictor of the advantages one has at birth and one’s access to opportunity thereafter. HPN recognizes that even as race and ethnicity have remained key indicators of economic mobility, a newer trend has emerged whereby wealth inequality has increased between the high income and low-income households, across all racial groups, and our focus is on helping all individuals achieve their peak potential.

HPN is committed to transforming this reality. We are leveraging our national platform to reshape America's housing delivery system so all people can have a safe, affordable, place to live. Working alongside our members and partners, we are tackling today's housing affordability and cost crisis head-on, bringing our community-based, people-first approach to create lasting change at scale. The status quo costs us dearly in lost economic growth and productivity. By combining our practical expertise with a deep commitment to meaningful systems change, HPN and our members and partners are uniquely positioned to build a system that works for everyone.