When the Math Doesn’t Work
This Saturday, June 13th, I'll be at the Westland Impact Festival in Whitefish — first on a panel on innovative solutions for attainable housing with Riss Getts from the Whitefish Housing Authority, James Brown III of Story House, and Kim Morisaki from the Northwest Montana Community Land Trust, and then moderating a fireside chat on the future of impact investing and philanthropy in housing with Jamie Goguen and Brian Fairhurst. These are people doing genuinely interesting work in real places with real constraints, and I'm looking forward to the conversations.
What I keep coming back to, in preparation for this and frankly in the work I do every day, is a framing problem that sits upstream of all the technical solutions.
We have decided, somewhere along the way, that housing is a personal problem. You figure it out, you earn it, you buy it. And if you can’t make it work…well, that’s on you. Yet we treat roads, water systems, and schools as collective infrastructure — we fund them that way because we understand intuitively that when they fail, everyone downstream suffers.
Housing fails the same way. When a hospital can't recruit nurses because there's nowhere for nurses to live within a reasonable distance, that's not the nurses' problem. When a resort town can't staff its kitchens or its front desks because the workforce has been priced into the next county, that's not a staffing problem. When a school district loses teachers to markets where housing costs less, that's not a compensation problem. These are infrastructure failures. We just don't call them that.
The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates U.S. GDP could be 3.7% higher if we solved the housing supply problem. That's not a housing statistic — that's an economic one. And yet the conversation remains stubbornly focused on the individual — who qualifies, who gets the subsidy, who gets the voucher — rather than on what it costs all of us when the foundation isn't there.
I’m developing my own projects, and I've structured a lot of deals over the years. What I know is that the tools to build attainable housing already exist — it just takes a little bit of creativity, thinking outside the box - or, maybe just using the tools that we already have - such as opportunity zone financing, PACE, CDFI first-loss capital, historic, LIHTC, New Markets, community land trusts, employer-assisted housing funds. The problem, in most cases, isn't a shortage of need or a shortage of will. It's that not enough people know how to put those tools together in a way that actually closes.
That's what I'll be talking about Saturday. If you're at Westland, come find me. If you're working on something where the conventional financing isn't getting you there — let's talk.