Attaining Housing Stability

April always seems to usher in a sense of anticipation and excitement for the warmer months ahead. In the investment world, April means Q1 is behind us and most of us are assessing the progress of that quarter and where we are heading next.

Here at the Multifamily Impact Council, we are excited to announce the addition of several new members in Q1. Adding Belveron, CBRE and Yardi to our membership list makes us realize the breadth of our work and its impact on the multifamily industry. After all, impact investing is what our organization is all about—helping investors make a difference in people’s lives now and for the future. We appreciate all of our members and others who have embraced the Multifamily Impact Framework™, a market-based set of standards for multifamily industry impact principles and reporting guidelines. The framework is the first of its kind for our industry and was designed to help companies deliver more impact to renters, investors, and our communities, and it is available to download and adopt free of charge to all organizations who share our belief that healthy, financially stable renters create healthy, financially stable properties.

Housing stability is a key principle in our impact framework, and for good reason. Providing renters and their families with a stable place to call home impacts households in all facets of their lives. Housing stability has been proven to improve health outcomes, increase opportunities for steady employment and make it easier for kids to do well in school. It also helps property owners support their most at-risk renters and prevent homelessness before it begins. Housing stability goes beyond merely putting a roof over a family’s head—it means creating a place to call home, a place where they feel safe, confident, and comfortable. A place that provides services that help them stay in that home, improve their financial situation, watch their kids graduate from high school and become members of their neighborhood. That is what housing stability does for people.

In this month’s newsletter, we discuss the critical principle of housing stability with Nathan D. Taft, Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Jonathan Rose Companies. Nathan, who has deep expertise in this area, has also played an integral role in JRCo’s effort to create national models of best practice in the greening of existing buildings. In the interview below, Nathan defines housing stability and explains how multifamily stakeholders can promote this key principle at their properties.

Here's to the promise of spring that April brings and to many happy returns as we head into Q2!

Bob Simpson

President and CEO

Nathan D. Taft oversees Jonathan Rose Companies’ Investment Management division, including acquisitions, asset management, portfolio and impact management, and investor relations, and leads the firm’s strategy to acquire and preserve affordable and mixed-income multifamily housing in walkable, transit-oriented locations nationally. He has led the investment of eight equity funds in more than $3 billion of property investments and is a member of the firm’s Board of Managers, management team, and investment committee as well as internal advisory committees focused on anti-racism, compliance, risk, and resilience. Jonathan Rose Companies is a Silver Founding Member of the Multifamily Impact Council.

1. Housing stability is often difficult to define. How would you define this term?

As a firm dedicated to the creation and preservation of affordable and mixed income housing nationally, promoting housing stability is at the center of our work. For us, housing stability is the ability of an individual or family to maintain secure and consistent housing without the threat of eviction or homelessness. Housing stability means that the fabric of neighborhoods can be preserved, that seniors can age in place, and that families can also stay connected to their communities, schools, jobs, and friends without the threat that housing rental cost increases will drive them away. Housing stability is about ensuring people can stay in their homes by managing cost, but it is also about ensuring those homes are safe, high quality, energy efficient, and connected to support health, financial, and relational stability. And housing stability is about having services that support residents, to meet them where they are, and help them become empowered partners in creating a brighter future.

2. How can multifamily owners and operators promote housing stability among their residents?

Preserving affordable housing assets that already exist in our communities, and which are often at risk of losing their affordability due to gentrification and sometimes under-investment and abandonment, is a fundamental way to promote housing stability among our residents. Our family of equity funds has enabled us to move quickly to target at-risk properties for preservation, and within them, we create shared community spaces that host vital programming.

Once people are housed, resident engagement is a powerful way to provide stability with a human connection. Resident Services Coordinators, and in many instances property management staff, play a crucial role in assisting residents in retaining their housing by providing various support services, including case management, advocacy, financial assistance, meditation, referrals, and education.

In order to support all this work, we have developed a toolkit of service offerings centered around the social determinants of health to aid in housing stability. This holistic approach helps to address the social, emotional, and financial aspects of housing stability and establish a baseline so that, if things change, we can find ways to help.

For example, during the pandemic, this meant applying for emergency rental assistance payments for residents experiencing hardship. And today, across our portfolio, we continue to focus on eviction prevention and have implemented Esusu, which helps to bridge the racial wealth gap through reporting of on-time rental payments to credit agencies to build and boost credit scores and provides no-interest loans to residents in times of need.

In another example of services, we are connecting residents to food banks, and in some instances, arranging for community supported agriculture to bring fresh foods and vegetables on site at the properties. Our residents can be in a situation that requires them to make trade-offs among essentials, like food, medicine, and rent, and delivering healthy food options at little or no cost helps to relieve some pressure and boost housing stability. Further, we seek to tie this to health and wellness training, and even to cooking classes that help residents learn to prepare healthy meals.

3. What are the chief threats to housing stability? How can these threats be overcome?

As noted above, chief threats can be the loss of existing affordable housing stock to gentrification and redevelopment or to under-investment that leads to a loss of units or to declining quality. As a firm, we created new financial tools to target preservation at the “speed of the market” and to intercede to avoid this happening as neighborhoods evolve. We make significant investments in every property we acquire, to renovate and green them, add social services, and actively asset manage the properties as stewards for the next generation. We preserve and extend affordability requirements and rental subsidy for residents, which can help provide a buffer against external, economic shocks, like job losses due to a recession.

We also know that housing costs, while a major driver of economic instability, are not the only costs rising rapidly across the country. Household budgets are being squeezed by increasing utility, healthcare, food, and transportation costs, among others. Our investment approach looks holistically at these intersecting issues and utilizes housing as the platform to ease economic burden for households to promote stability.

First, we acquire properties that are well located with access to transit options that connect residents with community resources and jobs, reducing the need for a car and its associated expenses. Our greening improvements bring energy efficiency to lower residents’ utility bills and better indoor air quality to improve health. Our resident services programming brings healthcare partners to properties to provide direct access to screenings, immunizations and other preventative care. And our food partnerships provide access to low-cost healthy food options.

Together, our actions reduce residents’ expenses in several areas to help cushion the force of inflation that is hitting American wallets and driving economic and housing instability.

4. How is your company addressing housing stability now and for the future?

Our firm is moving as quickly as it can to preserve affordable and mixed-income housing properties in key target markets where residents are rent burdened. Our strategy extends and often makes permanent deed restrictions that ensure access and affordability for low-income households.

While a crucial part of the equation, preservation alone is not enough. Our equity funds also create new affordable housing by devising investment strategies that apply new deed-restricted affordability requirements to market-rate acquisitions. In many cases, this workforce or naturally occurring affordable housing is in areas of rapid rent growth and at risk of becoming unaffordable to current residents. Using creative financial structures and partnerships with local authorities, we can place new income limits and affordability requirements that will persist with the property well beyond our ownership period.

In another area of our business, we develop ground up affordable and mixed-income housing, where we test and demonstrate new elements of sustainable design, affordability structures, and service provision by bringing large scale community partnerships to bear.

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