AHI STAFF
David Smith, Founder
Deidre Lal Schmidt, Executive Director
Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar, Research Director
Janaki Blum, Administrative Director
Yousuf Marvi, Analyst
David A. Smith
Founder
David A. Smith is the founder of the Affordable Housing Institute, which develops sustainable housing financial ecosystems worldwide. He is also founder and CEO of CAS Financial Advisory Services. (CAS FAS, formerly Recap Advisors), a Boston-based firm that specializes in complex multifamily asset problems, with an active practice area in the finance of existing affordable housing. CAS Financial Advisory Services has closed on nearly 800 transactions on more than 100,000 apartments with more than $2.7 billion in value. David provides high-quality analysis to Congress, the Millennial Housing Commission, CBO, HUD, and others, and was a principal member of the 1996 Senate mark-to-market working group. A 1975 Harvard graduate, David is an award-winning author with more than 100 published articles in real estate, valuation, and policy periodicals, and a textbook. David is also a senior fellow at the University of Maryland. Detailed biography here.
dsmith{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Deidre Lal Schmidt
Executive Director
As AHI's inaugural Executive Director, Deidre Schmidt is charged with shaping AHI's vision into tangible and ongoing work in both research and consulting spheres, and with growing the organization's revenue, activities, network, and impact. To this she brings over 16 years' work in affordable housing finance throughout the US, plus several years' academic study on international challenges of housing, urbanization, and finance. She is both a creative and tenacious innovator in affordable housing development and finance, and a passionate advocate of housing affordability for very low income or marginalized urban populations.
International study of informal settlements. Deidre comes to AHI having just completed a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she concentrated on the phenomenon of informal settlement globally and shared her considerable experience in US affordable housing finance and development. At Harvard, she studied and advised on and traveled to Mexico, Brazil and China; worked with Columbia University's SlumLab project and the Graduate School of Design's informal urban settlement landscape architecture seminar; and spoke at Harvard, MIT, and Peking University. A year earlier, Deidre was selected as German Marshall Fellow representing the US on housing and urbanization study tours across Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Germany, the Slovak Replublic, and Serbia. She has also visited informal settlements in Peru, Bolivia, Kenya and South Africa.
Deep experience in US affordable housing development and finance. Before Harvard's Loeb Fellowship, Deidre spent 16 years in real estate development, finance and consulting across the United States, tackling both complicated financial transactions using multiple resources, and also policy challenges in neglected income and tenure configurations. As a consultant, she was part of a team (working with Greater Metropolitan Housing Corporation and the Northcountry Cooperative Development Fund) that pursued preservation transactions for manufactured home communities. Because residents own their physical structure, but not the land on which their homes sit, they face economic dysfunctionality – and political marginalization – strikingly similar to land-tenure problems in the global south.
Before that, Deidre was Vice President of Development for Brighton Development, a US for-profit Mission Entrepreneurial Entity (MEE) whose mixed-use and mixed-income developments are credited with the residential revival of the Minneapolis riverfront. There she developed properties from conception to completion, using the full range of US resources, including Section 8, HOME, CDBG, TIF, 501 c3 and Housing Revenue Bonds, Low Income Housing and Historic Tax Credits, and philanthropic sources. As Acquisitions Manager for the National Equity Fund (a national MEE subsidiary of LISC), she underwrote new affordable housing investments.
In her first position after graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in International Relations, Diplomacy, Deidre was first Project Manager and then Director of National Consulting for Artspace Projects, Inc., a non-profit MEE developer of live/work projects for low-income artists. She worked in historic preservation, cultural facility development/management and cooperative ownership/leasehold cooperative models. Via consulting, Deidre facilitated the organization’s national expansion, increasing earned income, identifying development project opportunities and initiating a national conference and information exchange among arts and development practitioners.
dschmidt{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar
Research Director
As AHI's Research Director, Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar leads AHi's efforts to learn about housing finance ecosystems in countries around the world, to synthesize the findings into principles applicable across environments, and then to convert these tentative findings into broadly circulated and debated theories and white papers. She will also organize and coordinate AHI's 2009 symposium on these issues. To this role Rosabelli brings over a decade's passion for, knowledge of, and commitment to improving the lives of poor urban slum dwellers. She understands the challenges of modern cities and the links between poverty and inadequate housing.
Rosabelli comes to AHI as a 2008 Harvard Kennedy School of Government graduate, where she was an Edward S. Mason Fellow and the recipient of a Jorge Paulo Lemann Fellowship for Brazilian citizens interested in public service. From 2004 to 2007 she was special assistant to the rector (president) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (a city of 2,000,000 near São Paulo, Southeast Brazil), where she was Coordinator of the Department of International Relations as well as assistant in implementing the Institutional Strategic Plan (with a budget of more than 12 million reais).
Before Campinas, Rosabelli served as Secretary of Housing and Urbanism in Petrolina, Pernambuco, her home city of roughly 260,000 inhabitants in one of Brazil's poorest regions. There she organized the Municipal Stage and was an elected Delegate for both the State and National Stages of the First Conference of the Cities, a massive national effort to create a unified National Urban Policy (Housing, ‘Environmental’ Sewage, Urban Programs, Traffic, Transport and Urban Mobility written via an inclusive democratic process). She also coordinated the Program Subsidy for Social Interest Housing (PSH), a Federally and locally funded innovative program for very-low and virtually no-income Brazilians delivering affordable housing, R$4,500 for each 43 square meters, complete with infrastructure, construction supervision, and resident training. Rosabelli managed the entire process from conceptual approval (Mayor’s office, City council and the Brazilian Federal Bank) through contractor selection and then construction supervision.
As an undergraduate, she worked in several favelas in Recife, Pernambuco's capital, and conducted research on the impact of governmental low-income housing programs. While at university, she also was Production Coordinator for “Brazil, 500 Years of Architecture,” and the Executive Coordinator to produce the book Architecture Brazil. In this role she supervised more than 60 people among researchers, research and design assistants, translators, and editing, revision and design teams.
Trained as an architect, Rosabelli received a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Pernambuco, her thesis winning honorable mention in the 2000 Opera Prima national competition; and a master’s degree in Urbanismo from the Pontifical University of Campinas, writing her thesis on the political implications of federal housing policies in northeastern Brazil. Her thesis advisor was Dr. Raquel Rolnik, Secretary of Urban Programs of the Ministry of the Cities (Federal Government) and now UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.
rcoelhokeyssar{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Janaki Blum
Administrative Director
As AHI's Director, Dr. Janaki Blum manages AHI's growth and development on both the revenue and fulfillment sides. In this role, she has lead responsibility for responding to RFQs/RFPs, teaming or prime-sub arrangements with other experts (whether corporate or individual), staffing and team management in work delivery, and training, development, and quality control on AHI's work products.
Dr. Blum brings to AHI a passionate interest in and commitment to affordable housing as an element in sustainable development, and a diverse background touching on all aspects of NGO activity, including non-profit development and management, experience in sustainable development and affordable housing, and knowledge of numerous markets and cultures around the world. Before joining AHI, she was director/manager of SARID, a non-profit organization specializing in sustainable development programs, including low cost housing, in South Asia. At SARID she administered all consulting projects as well as SARID's fundraising, outreach and publicity campaigns, with the goal of presenting SARID's capabilities as a trusted expert on South Asian public-policy matters. In this role, she worked on implementing low cost housing/building programs in areas hit by devastating natural disasters in Sri Lanka (tsunami) and Pakistan (earthquake).
Before SARID Dr. Blum was a research and development consultant to an engineering and construction firm, following similar roles in academic institutions and start-up companies in the US and Europe, as well as being a scientific project leader in Switzerland.
Beyond her work experience, Janaki's life has given her perspective into the challenges of building successful housing financial ecosystems throughout the world. Sri Lankan by birth, she has been educated in England and Switzerland, with a bachelor's from the University of Sussex, a Master's from the University of London, and her doctorate from the University of Zurich. Her post-doctoral education includes courses at MIT and in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts.
Having worked professionally in Sri Lanka, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, Dr. Blum is fluent in English, German, and Sinhalese.
jblum{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org
Yousuf Marvi
Analyst
Yousuf Marvi serves as an Analyst to AHI, in which capacity he helps develop the organization’s research initiative and provides support to its consulting program. On the research side, his responsibilities include the independent pursuit of research threads, assisting with graduate student research and the dissemination of research findings. In addition, he helps coordinate and document AHI’s Exchange series and symposia. Yousuf also creates financial models and gives other support for consulting and promotional activities at AHI.
Yousuf comes to AHI as a 2009 double major in International Relations and Economics with a minor in Math from Connecticut College, where he was elected to the Student Government Association.
As an undergraduate he studied with Professor Edward J. McKenna, performing post-Keynsian analyses of Islamic monetary economics, and authoring a paper which he was invited to present at International Conference on Islamic Economics and the Economics of OIC Countries in April 2009.
Yousuf also worked with Professor Hossein G. Askari of George Washington University and Dr. Zamir Iqbal (Senior Consultant, World Bank) to research cross-cultural understanding of usury, and to co-author a paper on signaling and foreign direct investment.
In the summer of 2006, he received support from the President’s Relief Fund to study the affects of post-disaster development and rehabilitation of the Azad-Kashmir, Pakistan earthquake of October 2005, recording his research experience of disaster relief on film. He also traveled to China where he had the opportunity to document the development disparities between rural and urban areas.
As a volunteer, and later employee, he helped the Homeless Hospitality Center of New London, CT manage the national data on homelessness, and aid homeless guests with computer literacy and with accessing social services, including affordable housing. Through these and other voluntary activities, including Big Brother and Sister, and ESL tutoring programs, Yousuf has had exposure to a wide spectrum of perspectives and experiences.
ymarvi{@}affordablehousinginstitute{dot}org