Partnerships - Complementary Skills

Developing successful partnerships, I believe, is the key to good community development. But the use of the term “public-private partnership” is often overused and misused. For years I followed the path that most state and federal agency employees do and mislabeled the projects that I funded as partnerships. But I realize now that this couldn't be farther from the truth.

In my opinion, and the opinion of others, partnerships require both parties to work in consort towards a common goal. Partners use each others skills in order to achieve their goals in a way that doesn’t burden one partner more than the other. In the process of financing affordable housing, or any community development project, there is typically a clear lack of “partnership” taking place.

I don’t want to minimize the role that government or private funders have in making affordable housing possible. But, I don’t see that the process of setting up rules and regulations, application and award procedures, then monitoring the successful building of housing by awardees as a partnership.  I certainly don’t feel that I’m in a partnership with the plumber that I select to fix the leaking pipe under my house.  I don’t feel that I’m in a partnership with the police officer that enforces speed limits in my neighborhood, though I’m happy he does. The point is that paying someone to do something, like build affordable housing, does not mean that you’re in a partnership with them.

To me, partnership means that you “do work” together and using your complementary skills to increase the likelihood of success. In housing that means I have to put some effort into the process and ensure that I fulfill the roles and responsibilities that I take on in order to make the project work. In our land banking program we work hard to screen properties and ensure that we’re not getting a project site that won’t work for my local partner. We use our skills in acquisition, property review, financing and sometimes fundraising to ensure that our partners can focus on their responsibilities.

While some might say that we also take on the role of monitoring and ensuring compliance like a state agency, I argue that the difference in a partnership is that both parties have agreed to ensure a common goal and affirmed this through our contracts. I do take on the role of reporting to our funders and financiers that we are being successful. I need the help of my partner to provide some information, but I collect, process and report that information back to our funders. Again, this is part of the partnership process, a process that I hope allows our partners to focus on building communities, which they are great at.

When it all comes together we get housing done. We allow our partners to focus on their strengths in building quality homes, helping families become homeowners and revitalizing neighborhoods. We share a common goal, we share responsibilities and we achieve more through good partnerships.

Dave

Affordable Green for Everyone

Common Ground, New South Wales

It’s been far too long since my last post. We’ve been super busy at work with closings, new programs and preparation for a new fundraising program. All that aside, I came across a beautiful affordable and green housing project that recently won an award at the world architecture festival. The project call Common Ground was designed by the arch and planning firm Hassell and is located in Camperdown, New South Wales, Australia. While the project is both beautiful and highly efficient it’s also a great example of the new direction that affordable housing has taken as green building techniques have become mainstream and both public and private funders realize the need for energy efficiency in housing.

This type of green and affordable housing is not just popping up in Australia though, and because I live and work in Texas I wanted to share some other great examples of green affordable housing, that’s really cool.

Cevallos Lofts, San Antonio

First off is the Cevallos Loft in San Antonio, Texas. I got to visit this great property just last week during the Texas Association of Local Housing Finance Agencies annual conference. This place blew my socks off. While the location is considered more of an “up and coming” neighborhood, the property is only 5 minutes from downtown and near San Antonio’s world famous riverwalk. The interior courtyard and pool reminded me of a luxury hotel, but I had to keep pinching myself and remember that low-income families also lived in this property.

2424 Sakowitz, Houston

Another great group of recent green and highly artistic properties in Texas are owned and managed by New Hope Housing. This great organization based in Houston, TX have broken the mold of what we think about SRO development. Gone is the idea of bunkhouses and old pay by the week motels. New Hope has successfully mixed art, architecture and green building into everything they touch.

Well, I wish I had more time, cause I might just turn this into a coffee table book if I did. Hope you enjoy the pics and links. Now go out and support affordable housing in your neighborhood.

Best regards,

Dave

A Smarter Way to Help Others, While Making Profits

I may not be a frequent blogger but I do consider myself a voracious reader. This morning while waking up slowly to a new day I read a great post by Erik Simanis on the Harvard Business Review. Erik’s newest article was titled The Smart Way to Make Profits While Serving the Poor. Now I’ll admit the title attracted my attention because of its almost devious tone, but the article gave me some great ideas about my own community development work.

Eric’s argument can be broken down like this. “Low price, low margin, high volume” is the traditional model for serving low-income people. However this model requires that a product obtain a large share of the market in order to be successful (30% or more according to Eric).  While his examples are more focused on consumer products, I feel that this same situation also plays out in the community development field.

I work with lots of nonprofits across a very large state. Many struggle to make ends meet because they are also trying to use the “low price, low margin, high volume” model. Unfortunately, there are very few that reach the last, and according to Eric, most important aspect, high volume.

The nonprofits I know are great at producing good products at very low prices and at very low margins. However, it can take years to grow to the point of capturing 30% or more of a market, and in larger urban areas that goal may never be obtainable.  Many groups do manage to hang on and have minimal impact for many years, but never see the growth or impact that they should by using this model of development.

So what’s Eric’s solution? Well, he points to three other strategies that can work individually or together.

• Localise and Bundle Base Products
• Offer an Enabling Service
• Cultivate Customer Peer Groups

These strategies have also been used by many nonprofit organizations successfully. Here are a few examples from the work that I do.

The most successful rental property portfolio that I’ve financed in the past 5 years is run by an organization call Rainbow Housing Assistance Corporation. While they’ve grown by leveraging housing tax credits and tax exempt financing to build a large multi-state housing portfolio, I think that the key to much of their success is the resident services programs that they run.  One might think this service fall more under the category of an “enabling service”, but Rainbow’s delivery system meets the “localize and bundle” category.

Rainbow develops and packages core training and tenant service programs from their home office. These packages are then customized to meet local needs and to leverage local talents and direct service providers. The benefit of this approach is that Rainbow can produce very consistent reporting and performance across a wide variety of properties and locations.

Other organizations do this successfully too. Habitat for Humanity is a great example of a nonprofit that has grown large, and relatively successful, based on their ability to centralize planning and product development, and then dispersing those based products to affiliates on both a national and global scale.

Enabling services are probably the area in which I see the most crossover in the affordable housing sector. Those groups that are the most successful have developed key services that clients can access, which either lead to obtaining housing, or are the pathway to moving up and out of subsidized rental housing programs. Home builders in the affordable arena that provide homebuyer counseling, down payment assistance and in some cases post home buyer services generally are the most successful. Many organizations even start out in one service and then grow into new arenas in order to become more self sufficient.

One recent example of this is Frameworks Community Development Corporation, a growing homebuyer education provider that we’ve helped to become a housing provider through acquisition and redevelopment of foreclosed and blighted properties. Having just reviewed their most recent financial statements shows me that their success in transitioning from a single service entity, into a multi-service one, has been very beneficial for their bottom line.  And very likely for the benefit of their clients, too.

The last area that Eric writes about, cultivating customer peer groups, is an area that nonprofit also do well at, but this is the key component that I think I can do better at in my own work. Over the past three years we’ve built up a network of local partners who’ve helped us build a statewide land banking program with more than 350 properties, to date. Understandably, I’ve been a bit busy with the individual aspects of this program, but Eric’s article helped me realize that there was one significant weakness to the program.

I’ve failed to cultivate our network and bind them together under a common mission and goal. You might call it the ‘forgetting the forest for the trees’ syndrome, but I realized this morning that if my program is going to become more successful I need to focus on this aspect of the program’s development.  Building the strength of my network might also increase participation by my local partners and lead to more property purchased, redeveloped and sold to low-income families. That’s not only our goal, but our mission.

I’ll try to focus on this over the next several months and record what steps I take to move forward. Any advice from readers would be great.

Best regards,

Dave

A New Twist on Reusing Abandoned Properties

I really love creative people, especially those that create new ways to reuse abandoned or blighted properties. A new story from Next American City highlights the creativity that one man in New Orleans uses to turn a blighted neighborhood home into a playscape for Kids and Adults alike.

This kind of creativity is not new either. There are hundreds of examples of guerrilla urban planning taking place every year,  every week and every day. From bike paths in Mexico City to temporary shelters for the homeless inAtlanta. One of the largest and most global of these trends that I know of is Parking Day. In thier own words:

“PARK(ing) Day is a annual open-source global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public places.

Since 2005, PARK(ing) Day has evolved into a global movement, with organizations and individuals… creating new forms of temporary public space in urban contexts around the world.”

I really hope I continue to see more and more of this type of creative, out of the box style thinking not only in urban planning but housing development.

Best aye,

Dave

A Unified Theory of Social Change - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review

Anyone who reads this blog regularly, will know that I'm a big fan of Dan Pallota. Here's a new post from him that get's me thinking and hoping for the type of change that we need. 


A Unified Theory of Social Change - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review


Hope you enjoy too, 


Dave

Bike Storage Wars

Now I understand that not everyone in the world will adopt a cycling lifestyle. Not everyone will agree that cycling is the most efficient form of transportation. Or, that cyclists and motorists should share our public right-of-ways. But I was shocked to read a diatribe posted by David Smith from the Affordable Housing Institute.

Mr. Smith is obviously no fan of cycling. Which is too bad, because much of what he talks about when it comes to leveling the playing field for housing and infrastructure development should be equally applied to cycling both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

While I could probably dissect his diatribe against urban cycling and bikes line by line, I’ll try to focus on just a few points.

1. The loss of common space to bike lanes.

The idea that our world outside of homes and businesses is common space is nothing new, but like all common space, there are those who feel they have more rights than others. Mr. Smith not only believes that bicycles don’t belong in public spaces, he relegates them to the level of satellite dishes.

“That bicycles are used exclusively in public spaces, not private ones, further marks them as urban infrastructure.  Like other forms of private infrastructure such as satellite dishes, they raise tricky questions of urban property rights, imposition on the public realm, and who pays for the externalities.”

Not only does Mr. Smith put bikes in the same realm as satellite dishes, he also seems to believe that the cyclists are out to take away the rights of other users of public space. Now I can only assume that he’s referring to all the space that drivers are losing to bicycle lanes, but I can’t help but think that he’ll be targeting pedestrians and how much public space that sideways are taking away from “other people’s public space” next.

“Back in America, as is so often the case, we are much more willing to take away other people’s public space for bicycle lanes than to surrender our own private space.  (That’s a good illustration of political dynamics at work; taking someone else’s street benefits my constituency and costs me nothing.)  Personally, I think bicycle lanes a dubious bit of urban planning because they consume a common resource (street space) for a minority use (representing well less than 1% of all urban vehicular traffic).”

2. The value of parking spaces.

When Mr. Smith starts in on bicycle parking in residential buildings he tries to take a purely economic tact to his argument that bicycles are invading the public and private realm. By breaking down a building into three primary functions (Utility and structural core, Revenue producing space, and Non-revenue common areas) he attempts to show how bicycle parking falls in the the non-revenue category and is therefore wasteful for developers to consider including.

When designing structures, developers hate that third category of space, because it adds nothing to their pro-forma and yet is not justified by necessity.  It’s discretionary, hence questionable – and developers wrack their brains seeking either to minimize the physical non-revenue space or to maximize the revenue they get from it (e.g. by renting out the clubhouse or charging for storage).  Thus developers hate unfunded mandates like this one:

What strikes me as ironic is these very arguments were expressed nearly 100 years ago when the automobile started to become common place. Developers were faced with the very same challenges in meeting the demands of buyers and renters to provide new space for cars. One might argue that cars had a greater impact on taking away public space then bicycles ever will.

The public works of Robert Moses, in New York City and the Hudson Valley are prime examples of projects that took great swaths of public space and funding away from other users for the advancement of automobiles and automobile users. But possibly, Moses had a vision and understanding where our society was headed in the mid to late twentieth century, and may have ultimately shaped not only our past but present development strategies. And maybe contemporary planners have a similar vision and are designing the next form of urban landscape that will last for the next century.

In any case, there is little doubt in my mind that at some point there was a writer and thinker who expressed a similar dislike for automobiles, as Mr. Smith does for bicycles.

3. What makes a good cycling city.

Finally, Mr. Smith wraps his critique of cycling by attempting to make judgements on what makes a good cycling city. Of course, he ignores the obvious fact that most cities have been designed to exclude cyclists (and horses for that matter) for the past 80 years, but I’ll let him draw the noose around his own rantings.

“Not every city works as a bicycle town.  You need a temperate climate (bicycling in the snow sucks), a largely flat topography (you can bike in San Francisco but you’re an athlete to do it), a central city that lends itself to hundreds of short (under one mile) point-to-point natural transits, and a downtown that can readily exclude trucks and transport (which beat up city streets and disrupt traffic flow)..”

“Whether bicycles should be part of future urban transport is a debatable proposition, since bicycles are an inflexible mode of transport (one person only), useful only to a small subset of the urban population (basically, healthy people between 20 and 60, traveling alone), with limited cargo-carrying capacity, and physically risky.  (At least two of my friends have been doored, painfully if not worse, while riding through the city, and I myself went head-over-handlebars one rainy weekday morning in Amsterdam forty years ago.) “

I know that my words have been harsh and I’m not very excited to put out such a critical post about another bloggers work. Especially, one that I admire so much for his work in housing. But cycling is important to me. I’ve ridden for leisure and commuting for nearly thirty years now. I love my bikes and love the freedom they have afforded me since childhood. And, maybe I am taking up public space by asking for equal access to the roads and streets that I have and will continue to pay for like everyone else with or without a car. I only hope that others like Mr. Smith eventually see that sharing our public space really isn’t an imposition. They may even realize that the lessons they learned in kindergarten about sharing and tolerance are the best lessons ever.

Best aye,

Dave

Living in a Greenhouse

I just read about a amazing looking project in Nantes, France called Habitat 44. Now I'm not sure if that's the name of the project, or the organization that sponsored and manages it, but I couldn't wait to make a brief post about it.

The project was designed by Tetrarc as a 39 unit social housing development focused on community gardens and shared living spaces. The building looks like a four story green house and appears to let an enormous amount of natural light into every space. Habitat 44 also include a mix of rental and home ownership opportunities for residents and is affordable for low and moderate income households.

The design team also organized the layout of most units around kitchen and bathrooms so that living spaces and bedrooms would be exposed the exterior views and natural lighting. Additionally, each unit has direct access to the community gardening spaces, which encourages more interactions among residents.

So check out Arch Daily's article about the project and links to Habitat 44's developers.

Best aye,

Dave