Meet 10 executives who are pushing the industry forward.
Women comprise about 36.7% of commercial real estate professionals but hold just 9% of C-suite positions, according to the latest study by the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network.
The 2020 figures show that little progress has been made in the past decade, and there’s much work to do for women to achieve parity. Conducted in partnership with the MIT Center for Real Estate, the “2020 CREW Network Benchmark Study: Gender and Diversity in Commercial Real Estate” is the fourth comprehensive study by the Crew Network.
The report also reveals that women still face a substantial wage gap. They earn 10% less than men in base salaries, and the gap is even wider for Asian, Black, and Hispanic/Latinx women.
Only 16% of respondents reported that 25% or more of the professionals in their workplace are Black, indigenous, and people of color.
However, some of the findings show that progress may be coming. The study saw a 5.4% increase in women respondents 39 years and younger, indicating a growing generation of young and emerging women professionals in the industry. In addition, more women (32%) are aspiring to the C-suite, a 4% increase from 2015.
In the affordable housing industry, women have been at the helm of a number of leading organizations. And, this year, several more women have or are about to step into top roles, including Amy Albery, who is poised to become CEO of Wallick Communities, and Catherine Cawthon, who became the new president and CEO of the Ohio Capital Corporation for Housing.
“When you’re given an opportunity that you don’t have all the answers for, and that scares you to death, say yes,” Albery advises other women. “Seize that opportunity.”
“Find your voice and speak out,” adds Sandra Brooks Henriquez, CEO of the Detroit Housing Commission. “As in any profession, learn your craft and then put it to work. As women, we need to remind ourselves that we are good and we are good enough to do this work as well as anyone else can.”
To raise the visibility of women in affordable housing and the significant contributions they make, Affordable Housing Finance is highlighting 10 leaders in the industry.
Lisa Alberghini
The Housing Partnership Network (HPN), a collaborative of the nation’s leading affordable housing and community development nonprofits, held more than 100 virtual meetings to assist members through the COVID-19 crisis last year.
It began with one urgent meeting March 10 just as the pandemic was hitting. From there, HPN established 12 different peer groups, such as chief financial officers, resident services leaders, and multifamily housing developers, and began holding gatherings for each of them to address their specific needs.
Ideas from one organization would be shared with others. For example, a nonprofit in a state about to go into lockdown would gain insight from another that was already operating under similar restrictions.
Peer-to-peer learning is at the core of HPN and its more than 100 member organizations, says Lisa Alberghini, the collaborative’s executive vice president of peer exchange, policy, and innovation.
“The work on COVID will continue this year, and we’re going deeper into peer exchange in other areas as well,” she says. Other key issues will include an increased focus on new development, racial equity, and greater policy opportunities given the new administration.
Alberghini also is working to create partnerships with colleges and universities to introduce young people, especially people of color, to the industry.
She joined HPN in 2019, bringing 36 years of experience as an affordable housing developer and working at nonprofits. She was the longtime president of the Planning Office for Urban Affairs, a Boston-based nonprofit developer. Before that, she worked at The Community Builders, another nonprofit developer, where she began her housing career and rose to director of the Boston office.
An interest in housing and public service may have been planted years earlier. As a young teen, Alberghini would assist her mother who provided art therapy at a senior housing residence, and she grew up in a home that was shared with elderly members of her family as they aged.
Alberghini is on the board of New Lease for Homeless Families, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing family homelessness in Massachusetts, and on the Multifamily Advisory Committee for MassHousing. Her daughter is an astrophysicist, currently doing post-doctorate work. Alberghini admires her ability to explain complex concepts with ease, and for entering another field not historically open to women.
Amy Albery
Amy Albery learned the importance of hard work while growing up on a dairy farm that’s been in her family since 1859. She and her two sisters would drive tractors, bale hay, and perform all the other duties required on a busy, working farm in Ohio.
The upbringing serves her today as she prepares to step into the CEO post at Wallick Communities, a leading affordable housing developer and owner.
Since joining Wallick in 2011, Albery has led two of the company’s five business units—affordable housing operations and asset management. She’s also held a leadership role in a third—development.
The firm announced last year that Albery, who’s in the transitional role of chief operating officer, will move into the top post this fall. Headquartered in New Albany, Ohio, Wallick owns 122 developments with nearly 9,000 affordable housing units and manages more than 12,000 affordable units.
“We’re focusing on strategic growth in affordable housing and senior living,” she says. “On the affordable housing side, we’re growing through both development and acquisitions. Our target is to acquire at least 500 units each year. The need for affordable housing is greater than it’s ever been.”
The firm will also work to help meet the growing need for senior-living communities, both assisted living and memory care, as baby boomers age.
“We’re focused on our purpose, serving both our associates and residents, and our financial success has followed,” says Albery, noting that the company’s mission statement is “opening doors to homes, opportunities, and hope.”
In addition to her role at Wallick, she serves on the board of the Midwest Affordable Housing Management Association and chairs its membership committee. She’s also vice chair of the federal affairs committee at the National Affordable Housing Management Association (NAHMA) and has been active with the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition and Housing Advisory Group. In 2020, NAHMA recognized her with its Industry Achievement Award for advocating both federally and locally for affordable housing.
Albery and her husband, Eric, have two teenage sons. She also works hard in her spare time as a member of the CrossFit training community.
Laura Archuleta
Laura Archuleta has been at the helm of Jamboree Housing Corp. for two decades, growing the nonprofit into one of the nation’s largest developers and owners of affordable housing.
When she joined the organization as assistant director in 1999, it had just three employees and a handful of small neighborhood housing properties. Archuleta moved into the top post two years later, and, under her steady hand as president and CEO, Jamboree has expanded to have 110 employees, nearly 10,000 affordable housing units, and a growing pipeline of projects.
Headquartered in Southern California, the nonprofit recently received funding under the state’s new Homekey program to acquire and convert three motels into housing for people who have been homeless. It’s an effort to get the state’s most vulnerable residents into housing quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic and eventually create more permanent supportive housing. Jamboree has been expanding statewide, and one of the projects is its first in Northern California’s Santa Clara County.
The move builds on the firm’s growing work in providing supportive housing for people who are living with mental illness and coming from homelessness. In addition, Jamboree has been active in developing affordable housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods and near high-performing schools through local inclusionary housing programs.
Archuleta, who earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a master’s in public administration, thought she would work in local government and be a city manager. While working at a redevelopment agency, she became involved in affordable housing. She also had a personal connection—Archuleta’s mother grew up in public housing outside of Boston.
“I realized the importance of having high-quality stable housing that’s affordable to families and seniors,” she says. “It’s the backbone of the whole community. I veered off the city management path and stuck with the affordable housing piece.”
Joining Jamboree was an opportunity to continue her housing work, and it also was a good move at a time when she was starting a family. Archuleta and her husband have three children—two are now in college and one is in high school.
She’s also a leader in the larger industry, serving on the boards of the California Housing Consortium and the California Building Industry Association (BIA). Archuleta has earned multiple awards during her career, including the 2017 Lynn Jacobs Memorial Affordable Housing Award from the BIA’s Los Angeles/Ventura Chapter and the 2016 Spire Award for superior performance from CREW (Commercial Real Estate Women) Orange County.
Alice Carr
Alice Carr has spent most of her career financing affordable housing across the country.
As she enters her 10th year with JPMorgan Chase and fourth as managing director and head of community development banking, Carr has helped grow the platform, including doubling the business and building out its historic tax credit investment business, which has allowed the firm to take on large affordable housing deals that also utilize historic credits. Carr’s team is working on two such deals with the New York City Housing Authority.
The firm traditionally focused on its construction lending platform, but it’s now ramping up its permanent lending capabilities, according to Carr.
“We want to use both on-balance sheet and off-balance sheet capabilities,” she says, noting that the goal is to have a full suite of complementary permanent products.
Carr’s group also will have a critical role in JPMorgan Chase’s big Path Forward initiative, a $30 billion commitment to advance racial equity and promote opportunity in underserved communities. The commitment includes financing an additional 100,000 affordable rental units in the next five years through new loans, equity, and direct funding that will help promote and expand affordable housing and homeownership.
“The Path Forward commitment is broad and across the firm, but community development banking will have an important role in bringing our tools to the table and expanding our work under that umbrella,” she says.
Carr’s path in the industry began as a loan associate at the Low Income Investment Fund, a prominent community development financial institution. She was later part of Citi Community Capital for 12 years, where she was managing director and Western regional director before joining Chase in 2011.
“The stars aligned for me when I took an affordable housing finance graduate class at the same time I was working as an intern at the Los Angeles Housing Department,” says Carr, who was interested in economic disparities and civil rights before she majored in American studies at Occidental College and then pursued a master’s degree in urban planning at UCLA. “The intersection between public policy and building something tangible that has such a tremendous impact on people’s lives not only checked the boxes for me, it was also thrilling.”Carr has played an active role in the larger industry, serving on the boards of Enterprise Community Investment and Enterprise Community Loan Fund. She also chairs the board of the California Community Reinvestment Corp.
Based in Los Angeles, she and her husband have four children. The family recently started raising chickens.
Catherine Cawthon
Catherine Cawthon has stepped into a big role this year, becoming president and CEO of the Ohio Capital Corporation for Housing (OCCH), a leading nonprofit low-income housing tax credit syndicator and financial intermediary.
While new to the post, she’s an industry veteran. She spent 21 years at Fifth Third Community Development Corp. (CDC), serving the last 11 years as president, overseeing the CDC’s housing tax credit and other investments that support community revitalization.
Working in affordable housing has allowed Cawthon to blend her skills in finance with her interest in community service. “Finding a way to help communities build a foundation with housing was a win-win,” she says. “It was great to be able to grow into that.”
Looking at the year ahead, Cawthon says OCCH will continue to focus on its core tax credit business, supporting both its investors and developers. Established in 1989, the nonprofit has raised more than $5 billion in equity and financed 50,000 affordable homes in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
The organization also has a growing community development financial institution (CDFI) affiliate and is looking at ways the CDFI can help communities recover from COVID-19-related challenges.
Throughout her career, Cawthon has made time to serve on the boards of different organizations and has made it a point to be an active leader. This has not only benefited the groups but helped in her own development, preparing her for her latest position, she says.
Cawthon serves on the boards of the Ohio Women’s Affordable Housing Network, National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, and Ohio Housing Council. She’s a former chair of the Affordable Housing Investors Council and has also been on the board of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.
The mother of three, Cawthon also has been active with The Mirth Project, which matches teens with their dream items. For example, if a youth wants to play sports but cannot afford the equipment, the organization will grant the items.
Suzanne Cope
Suzanne “Suzie” Cope has closed more than $400 million in deal volume over the last two years,
Managing director in Lument’s Colorado office, she originates and closes multifamily loans nationwide, with a focus on affordable housing. Cope plays a pivotal role in assisting developers fund their projects and helping her company reach its growth goals.
This past year came with the added challenges of COVID-19. “One of the things that we spent most of the year doing was working with our longer-term clients and helping them with their COVID-impacted properties, growing their business, and being an active part of their strategy sessions,” she says.
The new Lument brand was unveiled last year, and Cope has also been involved in integrating the firm’s legacy brands—Hunt Real Estate Capital, Lancaster Pollard, and RED Capital Group—under the new banner.
After working at Hunt, then Centerline Capital Group, earlier in her career, she rejoined the company as a director in the affordable housing and Federal Housing Administration group in 2017. Cope has also worked at Bellwether Enterprise Real Estate Capital.The industry veteran’s start came as an intern and eventually a senior account manager at Fannie Mae, where she structured transactions for affordable and market-rate housing mortgage relationships.
While earning her bachelor’s degree in finance and marketing, Cope played on the Tulane University golf team and still has a competitive side. However, in the big picture of affordable housing, it’s not just about who got a deal but that it got done, she says. “As long as the industry defines success as growing affordable housing as a whole and getting one more deal built and providing more services to residents, I think we’re all going to be successful,” she says. “The impact will continue to be exponential.”
The mother of a young daughter, Cope is on the board of the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association and is active with Housing Colorado. She has been recognized as one of GlobeSt.’s Women of Influence.
Michele Evans
Michele Evans has been in the multifamily finance business for over 30 years and has served in different roles at Fannie Mae since 1992. In August, she took over as head of multifamily and executive vice president.
For much of her time at Fannie Mae, she had been on the production side, working closely with the Delegated Underwriting and Servicing (DUS) lenders. She also was on the team that built and managed the small loan lending platform for multifamily.
But a decade ago, just after Fannie Mae went into conservatorship, she was promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer of Fannie Mae Multifamily, which allowed her to get an enterprise view of the organization.
“It gave me an opportunity to think about the whole experience behind the scenes and take that transactional rigor you put into a deal and decide what I wanted to get done,” she says. “To me that was really pivotal because it further advanced my background beyond just doing deals, and it served me well.”
One of her biggest accomplishments during that time, she says, was engineering Fannie Mae’s multifamily digital transformation.
“We have been on an eight-year journey to transform the technology used when a loan is first underwritten to when it gets paid off. At the core, we have retooled our infrastructure with an eye toward improving how to do business more efficiently and quickly, and how to use data in ways to ensure solid credit decisions are made in the quickest possible way.”
This investment paid off over the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic. “If we hadn’t done what we did, it would have been difficult to do $76 billion in business last year.”
After the record-breaking year, Evans says Fannie Mae Multifamily will be focused on its mission in 2021. It has a $70 billion cap, with at least 50% of the business being mission-driven affordable housing, defined as affordable for residents at or below 80% of the area median income. She says priorities include providing liquidity in a safe, stable, and affordable way; keeping the DUS platform healthy; continuing the digital transformation; serving renters; having the right staff for the future; and advancing diversity and inclusion externally and internally.
“I love the tangible nature of real estate, and I lean in pretty heavily to the mission side. I come to work every day realizing that I’m not only doing my job, I’m helping support much needed housing for working families.”
Sandra Henriquez
Sandra Brooks Henriquez is working to take the Detroit Housing Commission (DHC) to the next level.
In 2019, the longtime leader was named CEO of the agency, the largest owner of rental housing in the Motor City, providing approximately 4,000 housing units for seniors and families. In addition to operating public housing, DHC administers about 6,000 Section 8 vouchers and is looking to do even more.
“The board hired me to jump-start a real estate development program again,” says Henriquez. “Detroit has done a number of HOPE VI redevelopment projects across the city, but every urban area needs more affordable housing. I want to work with neighborhoods and community organizations to jump-start development of resident-centered affordable housing communities. In addition, DHC still owns a number of properties that have not been substantially modernized, a number of senior properties in particular.”
Working with her team, she is looking at different strategies to upgrade DHC properties as well as acquire sites to build new developments, with hopes of hearing hammers next year.
Henriquez was the longtime CEO of the Boston Housing Authority, where she turned a struggling agency into one of the nation’s leading public housing authorities, when she was picked by the Obama administration in 2009 to serve as assistant secretary for public and Indian housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). She was the first woman to hold that post.
Detroit was one of the cities Henriquez visited the most while at HUD. Federal officials took possession of DHC in 2005 because of regulatory compliance deficiencies, the distressed condition of its housing units, and other issues. After nearly 10 years, HUD returned DHC to local control in 2015. The agency has made significant progress, and Henriquez is charged with furthering that.
The mother of three describes providing affordable and stable housing as her “vocation and avocation.”
“I believe changing housing for someone might just be what they need to do the other things they’ve dreamt about in their lives for themselves and their family,” says Henriquez.
Michelle Missler
Service coordinators have played a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting residents in affordable housing communities across the country. They’ve led the charge to facilitate the distribution of food and medicine, implemented new health standards at properties, helped seniors access the internet to connect with resources and family, and combated resident isolation.
“Service coordinators have been unfortunately, but fortunately, training for an event like COVID-19 their entire careers,” says Michelle Missler, president and CEO of the American Association of Service Coordinators (AASC). “What has changed is there is an exclamation point at the end of what service coordination means now.”
By the end of February, AASC members had organized approximately 1,000 vaccination clinics at affordable housing properties nationwide and immunized 35,378 low-income residents, reported the association.
The main role of service coordinators is to assess and support residents, often seniors and individuals with special needs, in getting the services they need, according to Missler, who took over AASC this year after serving as vice president in 2020.
With 3,700 members, the Ohio-based association supports service coordinators across the country through education and advocacy and is a national resource for service-enriched housing. Missler hopes to expand the group’s research efforts and build new partnerships.
“There’s a tremendous opportunity for us to create system-to-system partnerships across the health care space and with other entities,” she says.
A licensed social worker, Missler began her career as a service coordinator at a senior housing development owned by National Church Residences. By the time she left the nonprofit organization, she was director of its support services program, leading more than 600 service coordinators. She also served as vice president of strategic partnerships at the Healthcare Collaborative of Greater Columbus, Ohio, and was director of the Franklin County Office on Aging before joining AASC.
She’s active in Vistage Worldwide, a leadership development and peer advisory organization, and through her local chapter regularly meets with nonprofit CEOs. The mother of two young boys, Missler has competed in seven mini-triathlons in recent years.
Dionne Nelson
Dionne Nelson, president and CEO of Laurel Street, has her residential development company poised to take the next big step.
“2021 is a growth year for Laurel Street,” says Nelson. “We plan to double our pre-COVID-19 production and invest significantly in our company infrastructure and team capacity.”
Most recently, the Charlotte, North Carolina, company’s peak production was 400 to 500 new construction starts per year. Now, it expects production to grow to approximately 1,000 new starts per year plus select acquisitions of naturally occurring affordable housing properties.
“We’ve been planning this growth for some time,” Nelson says. “We can see the pipeline effectively doubling. We’re also building our team and our infrastructure. It’s nice to be focused on moving forward and growth coming out of what was a tough year for most of us in the industry.”
Approximately half of the projects going forward will focus on low-income housing tax credit developments. The other half will be workforce housing projects that are not financed with housing credits but will still include some affordable units. “It allows us to serve a population in a market that is underserved, which is that ‘missing middle’ that we talk about,” Nelson says. “Because there is no federal subsidy that supports these units, they are relatively difficult to structure and finance, but it can be done with some creative blending of units and collaboration with investors.”
Laurel Street is entering its milestone 10th year in business. Nelson, who earned an MBA from Harvard, made the bold move to start the firm after working at Crosland. When the longtime real estate company decided to divest several of its operating divisions, including affordable housing development, Nelson raised capital and formed Laurel Street, taking over several Crosland properties that were under development and then finding additional deals while growing her team fivefold.
Now that the company has a portfolio of about 3,600 units and a strong pipeline, Nelson also is working to build the infrastructure to support the growth.
The company recently became the first organization to receive an investment from TruFund Financial Services’ $26 million Impact Developers Fund designed by TruFund, Morgan Stanley, and the Ford Foundation to provide capital and technical support to emerging real estate developers, especially businesses led by women and people of color. It’s corporate capital that will assist Laurel Street in its capacity building, including expanding its workforce and strengthening its infrastructure.
It’s important to Nelson to not only build a diverse staff at Laurel Street but to support and work with other minority-owned businesses. “We’re thinking about how we can extend that in a more robust way at the project level or in our company spending and who we partner with,” she says.
She’s a trustee for the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and a member of the national advisory board for the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing and ULI’s Affordable and Workforce Housing Council.
Source: Housing Finance
