NYC Affordable Housing Roles?
The title pretty much says it all. What are the best routes into affordable/mixed-income/workforce housing, ideally based in NY? While there seems to be heaps of competition for LIHTC etc, would hope that affordable housing investment/development will grow. Some insights into the most interesting companies/organisations would be much appreciated (including within the public sector if relevant). For a bit of background, I'm in my senior year of an urban planning focused degree at a reputable school, with some prior real estate experience (including as a summer analyst).
If you're competent, go work for one of the city agencies. All of the private developers poach from the HPD and HDC project manager pool. Plus, having worked in government, you'll make valuable connections.
It's actually a huge problem - many of the competent mid-level project managers leave and get paid by developers (good for them), but it means the people who can effectively drive projects forward from the public side keep leaving, which makes it harder to close. Catch 22
Thanks for this, appreciate it. It would be interesting to hear about the culture/hours/training opportunities at somewhere like NYCHDC at the junior level. Do you have any insights into this?
It depends on the role. If you're a project manager (e.g. on the transactional teams and not doing tenant application reviews or whatever), then I imagine that you'll have a very typical 9-5 job most weeks, with a couple weeks in June and December where you might be working a bit more to get closings past the finish line.
I haven't worked in one of those roles, but I can imagine a lot of varying opinions about the culture. Depends on who you're working for. Depends on the mayor/head of the agency - colleagues of mine raved about working for the Bloomberg Administration, because there was support from on high and shit got done. Heard more complaints about people who worked for de Blasio, as the whole administration was less organized and less "transactional" you might say. My guess is that mileage will vary. If you care about being in the public sector, even for a little while, you'll probably enjoy yourself more. Frankly, I don't find many people in affordable housing in general who aren't at least partially mission-driven, so maybe it's a non-issue, but someone who wants to get 6 months experience and leverage that into big dollars is going to have a bad time, I think.
BUMP. Ozymandia If somebody were to go into the private sector straight away, have you heard of any companies that are especially good in terms of training opportunities?
Honestly, not really. Most private developers in general don't have great training programs (to my knowledge), let alone in the affordable space. Obviously a bigger firm is going to be a better place to start, I guess - think L+M, BFC Partners, Omni, Jonathan Rose, BRP, etc. But generally speaking the trend is to hire from an agency, from a lender, out of an MSRED program, etc. You'll get more formal and I guess better "training" if you go work in a community lending group at Citi or Wells or wherever. LIHTC syndicators are probably a good place to be as well if you want to learn the business. Maybe some of the affordable housing-focused brokerage firms/teams. Hard to say.
There just isn't enough grunt work to justify hiring big analyst classes and then having them learn the ropes while they pump out endless variations of an underwriting or a pitch book they way you'd find in finance or in brokerage.
Do you have any insights on Citi Community Capital? #1 affordable housing lender, but curious if you had any insight on pay/culture/lifestyle? Or at lenders in general?
Fairstead is a great shop in NYC-- I work for their 'opposite but equal' shop based in SF and they do a lot of cool deals.
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