The recently announced fund will be administered by Enterprise Community Partners and help accomplish Los Angeles’ affordable housing agenda.

Earlier this month, local officials announced a new $100 million fund for affordable housing—the New Generation Fund—to be overseen by Enterprise Community Partners, working closely with the city of Los Angeles. In order to better understand the role of the New Generation Fund in Los Angeles and Enterprise’s part in lobbying Congress on the recently approved Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, TPR was pleased to speak with Enterprise Community Partners’ Southern California Director, Jeff Schaffer, and Vice President of Public Policy, Ali Solis.

Describe the mission of Enterprise Community Partners for our readers. What is the focus of the organization, and what is the Southern California agenda for the organization?

Jeff Schaffer: Enterprise Community Partners is a national non-profit organization, working in the field of affordable housing and communities, primarily as an intermediary to local community-based organizations throughout the country. Our goal is to provide technical assistance and capacity building for the affordable housing and community development industry and bring significant financing to support development of affordable housing and community facilities. Enterprise has been around now for over 25 years and was established by James and Patty Rouse. We’ve been in Los Angeles for just over ten years and our mission here is the same mission that we’re engaged in nationally. We have an active program of technical assistance training. We have a lending program to support the acquisition of property for affordable housing development. Enterprise Community Investment is the for-profit subsidiary of Enterprise Community Partners that does tax credit syndication, multifamily mortgage, structure finance and other real estate financing, so we have the staff from Investment here in the L.A. office as well as other national staff.

Mayor Villaraigosa, former Senator John Edwards, and Enterprise Community Partners Chief Executive Officer and President Doris Koo recently announced a new housing fund called the New Generation Fund, which will be overseen by Enterprise. Where is the money coming from, how will it be administered, and what is the promise of that money for Los Angeles?

Schaffer: In 2006, Enterprise hosted its annual Network Conference in Los Angeles {now the Enterprise Community Conference} —just around that time that Enterprise had been involved in New York City working to establish an acquisition fund. Mayor Villaraigosa asked Enterprise to work with his administration to create a similar fund in the city of Los Angeles. What makes this exciting and unique is that it’s a collaboration of the public sector, the private banking sector, and non-profit organizations working collaboratively to pull together this $100 million fund. Banks and financial institutions have invested $100 million of venture capital, which is the money that will actually go out the door in the form of loans to affordable housing developers. At the moment we have about $14 million for the city and foundations that will serve as a top loan loss reserve, money that will be drawn upon in the case of the loss of any loan originated from the fund. The investment by the city, along with the philanthropic dollars for that top loss reserve, basically help to buy preferential terms from the senior lenders.

How will housing organizations and developers secure access to these funds?

Schaffer: We use New York as a model but then adapt that model to meet the needs and circumstances of Los Angeles. Typically, the housing developers, profit and non-profit, go to community development and financial institutions {CDFIs} as a source of pre-development lending. What we’ve done with the New Generation Fund is to engage the participation of all the CDFIs working in
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