Affordable Housing Institute : US

By: David A. Smith

 

Last week in Washington, as part of the World Habitat Day activities, AHI – in partnership with the National Housing Conference as host and the Housing Partnership Network as a co-sponsor – issued and discussed the Extract of our report, Mission Entrepreneurial Entities: Essential Actors in Affordable Housing Delivery.

 

It’s all about MEE – Mission Entrepreneurial Entity, that is!

 

This is a major report that changes the way people will think about and interact with MEEs.  Download the Study’s Extract here, and for the full report, see the end of this post.

 

We held the event (click here for more background) at the National Housing Conference, which over its distinguished 75 years of existence, dating back to 1934, has been the best-respected convener of thought leadership, research, and bipartisan advocacy on affordable housing. 

 

Dubbed a Creative and Effective Institution by the MacArthur Foundation

 

NHC is led by its president and CEO, Conrad Egan.

 

Egan, creative and effective, and by now an institution?

 

To reach our conclusions, we recruited two authors, one from the US and one from the UK, each with deep experience in affordable housing in their respective countries:

 

Ray Christman, principal US author, with Gaynor Asquith, principal UK author

 

Gaynor Asquith, arc4 Consulting, Manchester UK

 

As far as we can tell – and our participants include virtually universal experience – no study like this has ever been done, a remarkable omission considering the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of funding these organizations annually handle.  So we approached our investigation like Victorian naturalists, examining the species and making careful notes:

 

What species is this?

 

We selected representative and distinctive MEEs (which we’ve decided should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘please’) in both countries, US and UK:

 

The 23 profiled MEEs

 

We chose them for diversification of geography; of experience; of business model; of scale; and of portfolio.

 

The US has a strong population of MEEs along the coasts; many fewer in the South and Southwest

 

For each one, we looked at their history, current portfolio, financial statements (balance sheet and income/ expense), business lines, activities, CEO, and board.  We also interviewed their leadership, developed a standardized profiling document and populated it with each one, invited them to submit representative properties for inclusion in the appendix, and had their leadership review their final profiles. 

 

Even though England has one-fifth the US population, their MEEs average more than twice the size of US MEEs

 

To that we added in-depth interviews with non-MEE thought leaders, and had our initial draft further reviewed by some constructively sadistic editors.  The results (download the Study’s Extract here), we believe, are potent, because they both derive policy conclusions and back them up with a small mountain of evidence.

 

Here are the highlights:

 

1.  MEE is the right term … because all other terms are wrong

 

It’s always infuriated me that outside the US, the term of art is Non-Government Organization – as if being governmental were the world’s default state for all objects and being non-governmental was an act of conscious refusal. 

 

We could have listed many more things MEEs are not

 

Even worse, it describes the entities by what they are not and hence gives no indication of what they are

 

I’m a non-governmental organism … how about you?

 

As the co-panelists were inadequately avid blog readers, MEE was a new term to them, but as the symposium developed, they naturally adopted it — and the term facilitated further discussion.

 

2.  MEEs are at the heart of US and UK ecosystemic evolution

 

Forty years ago, the US and UK housing finance ecosystems were widely divergent – pure public in the UK, and pure private in the US.  Over the ensuing four decades, the two have evolved entirely independently, yet similar forms and principles have emerged in both:

 

Forty years of convergent evolution can’t be wrong!

 

Public-private partnership has supplanted pure public and pure private both as the funding architecture of choice.  MEEs have emerged as increasingly important counterparties, commanding a steadily growing share of resources.  They have become essential actors in the ecosystem.

 

Representatives of the growing species: Mike Pitchford of CPDC, Tom Bledsoe of Housing Partnership Network

 

3.  What we had thought one species was really two; Neighborhood and Production.

 

When we started, we thought that isolating MEEs as a species would be both a testable classification and a useful advance.  As our study delved more deeply, we realized we had to divide them further, because though they came from the same genus, they were distinct species.

 

When we looked closely, we saw two schools

 

The difference between Neighborhood MEEs and Production MEEs proved more than just a matter of scale.  It went to issues of culture, business and funding model, effectiveness, governance.

 

The difference between Neighborhood and Production MEEs

 

The difference in culture mattered enormously.  As Deb Schwartz of MacArthur observed, when they looked at potential donees,

 

“Look at what reports the board sees, and what it does with the reports it sees”

 

4.  Implications for the global South

 

Although of less importance to this audience, our authors and AHI all concluded that our findings are equally applicable around the world.  Indeed, both HPN (via Tom Bledsoe) and NHC (via Conrad Egan) have facilitated international linkages between their organizations and their counterparts in the UK and Canada.  Our work with SDI and others demonstrates that the same growth, structure, and financing challenges confronting southern MEEs have been or are being experienced by US and UK MEEs now.

 

The Equator isn’t a barrier; ideas should flow both ways

 

It was an absorbing hour and three-quarters, with a large and thoroughly engaged crowd:

 

Over a century’s worth of experience represented in four folks following the discussion.

 

This is significant work that we want to have significant exposure.  Download the Study’s Extract here. 

 

We’ve completed the full report – with narrative, and four-page profiles of each of the 23 selected MEEs, running a total of over 220 pages.  We’re still determining the best and most effective way of distributing it; if you’re interested in a copy, email mee@affordablehousinginstitute.org.

 

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