Harvard Real Estate Alumni Organization

Boston HREAO Innovation Series: Innovation in Housing Delivery & Policy

{For those who already registered: Security check in starts 7:30 AM and the program begins promptly at 8:00 AM Monday morning Sept. 30.  Your names will be at the security desk. Once you check in please proceed upstairs to the 26th floor reception area for Wilmer Hale at 60 State St, Boston, MA 02109.  Please arrive early so we'll have time to network and enjoy the coffee, juices, bagels and muffins before the program begins promptly at 8 AM. }

Dear Alumni and friends:

The Boston Harvard Real Estate Alumni Organization (HREAO), invites you to a Monday, September 30, 2019 8:00 to 9:30 AM program on “Innovation in Housing Delivery & Policy”. (Registration at 7:30 AM).  As part of our Innovation in Real Estate series, we’ll learn and discuss how affordable housing can be supported with resources other than direct subsidy or financial assistance.  The program is hosted by WilmerHale at their offices in downtown Boston at 60 State St, Boston, MA 02109. 

David A. Smith, AB, Harvard College and profiled on the HREAO web site at https://hreao.sigs.harvard.edu/article.html?aid=159, will speak on Sub-national non-cash resources.  David will explore how in the post-Federal era of affordable housing, states and municipalities have to (and can) mobilize/ monetize the eight forms of non-cash resource they possess, several of which they don’t even think of tapping.  A mixture of principles and examples will be provided.

Dr. Taylor Cain, Director of The Mayors Housing Innovation Lab (https://www.boston.gov/departments/new-urban-mechanics/housing-innovation-lab) and Marguerite Cramer of the City of Boston and will speak on The 3 P's: Bridging Public Assets, Public Benefits, and People in Boston (housing with public assets). In 2018 the Mayor's Housing Innovation Lab released a Request for Information that asked whether City assets could be combined with housing. With the goals of increasing housing affordability and supporting the rehabilitation of City buildings we turned our attention to our public assets such as libraries, fire stations, and municipal owned parking lots and asked for guidance on where such assets and housing might be co-located, what it might look like, and what the potential public benefits could be. At its core an experiment that prioritizes people, the Housing with Public Assets initiative offers the City of Boston a new way to re-imagine and expand the public benefit and value our City assets can bring to Boston residents. 

David A. Smith, founder and Chairman of Recap Real Estate Advisors and founder/ CEO of the Affordable Housing Institute, has spent his entire 44-year professional career figuring out where to find resources to close the cost-value gap in affordable housing, shaping and tapping them, and then foolishly altruistically communicating his discoveries with a view to making the pie higher.  From time to time this results in new pilot properties, housing paradigms, and housing programs.  These days his work is either state/ local or global, with current assignments ranging from being financial advisor to the residents of Bunker Hill public housing to sustainably lending to informally employed poor urban women in India.

Dr. Taylor Cain, Director of the Mayor's Housing Innovation Lab, is an urban ethnographer who recently completed her dissertation on the residential practices of middle-class households with children in Boston. A former summer fellow with the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, Taylor comes to her role in City Hall with an expertise in urban sociology, a curiosity about how people move through cities and a commitment to values of inclusion and equity. Marguerite Cramer is Advisor to the Chief of Housing and Director of Neighborhood Development at the City of Boston.  Margo received her MBA from the Harvard Business School and is pursuing a career dedicated to innovating in and across the public and private sectors.

HREAO’s “Innovation in Housing Delivery & Policy” session is responding to the call from leading housing market observers and policy researchers for more tools and non-subsidy resources.   In its most recent, “The State of the Nation's Housing 2019”, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University stated, “To ensure that the market can produce homes that meet the diverse needs of the growing US population, the public, private, and nonprofit sectors must address constraints on the development process. And for the millions of families and individuals that struggle to find housing that fits their budgets, much greater public efforts will be necessary to close the gap between what they can afford and the cost of producing decent housing.”

A December 2016 National Association of Home Builders publication “How Did They Do It? Discovering New Opportunities for Affordable Housing” featured a dozen detailed case studies from across the country showcasing the many ways in which communities can increase housing affordability. NAHB's research identified multiple non-direct subsidy strategies used in a variety of combinations to make affordable housing viable.

Please join us to hear from, and discuss with, our own leading experts who, recognizing the housing affordability crisis cannot be solved by limited available subsidies and financing tools, are also suggesting and executing imaginative and aggressive local, state and public-private partnership policies.

Monday, September 30  Registration begins at 7:30 AM, Program from 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM. Coffee, Juice and bagels will be provided.
Any questions? Contact Douglas P. Koch, MAI, AICP, Co-Chair Boston chapter Harvard Real Estate Alumni Organization at advisoryaffiliates@gmail.com or 617-512-6787