The affordable housing environment is extremely daunting and growing more challenging. Our nation has long confronted a structural affordability crisis with only limited public resources available to meet the housing needs of low-income people. Add to these unrelenting unmet needs the additional pressures of an aging affordable housing inventory, the continuous expiration of subsidy contracts and use restrictions, and the disproportionate impact of single-family foreclosures on low-income communities. Policy makers face stark questions around how to recapitalize aging properties and extend their affordability, how to stabilize neighborhoods hard hit by foreclosures, and how to create better social and economic outcomes for low-income families.
Over the last several decades, nonprofits have played a particularly important role in the provision of affordable housing, a role that has been growing in importance as other players in the system look to work with capable partners to address increasingly complex development, preservation, and neighborhood stabilization problems.
Within the nonprofit sector, a class of high-capacity nonprofit developers has emerged that make particularly compelling partners to the public sector in addressing critical affordable housing and community development needs at this time. This new high-capacity nonprofit model starts with a social enterprise ethos. These organizations mix a deep commitment to mission with sound business practices, strong management and organizational capacity, public-private partnerships, and large-scale impact. Read More...