What We Do

Our Services

AHI works with pro-poor innovators to address systemic obstacles to affordable housing. We provide expert advice, research, and capital to enable the development of and access to, affordable and equitable housing in any market.

Impact

Consulting

Thought Leadership

Chrysalis Housing Impact Accelerator

Rehousing Ukraine

Health Secure Housing

Impact

At the core of AHI’s Theory of Impact is the concept that housing is the foundation for any individual’s or family’s path to stability and opportunity. By itself, housing will not solve poverty, racial inequity, or social exclusion, but none of these challenges can be solved without housing as a key element. It is a critical underlying infrastructure of our neighborhoods, communities, and cities.

AHI prioritizes making catalytic and systemic impact in all of our work, though some projects naturally offer greater opportunity for change than others. In service of our mission, AHI will periodically spearhead initiatives or projects that would not exist but for AHI’s pro-bono or low-bono engagement. Such projects have included:

The incubation of early-stage entities in the housing space
Work with public-housing residents during a multi-year redevelopment process
Collaboration with international NGOs to design new strategies of sustainable engagement in the housing space.

Consulting

Although no two assignments are ever alike, we have found that our services commonly draw from principles, thoughtware, analytical tools, and experience in these typologies:

Housing Market Assessments.

Using our proprietary Housing Ecosystem Analysis tools we provide a detailed mapping of processes, entities, challenges, and opportunities on both the supply- and demand-side value chains to identify the types of intervention required for catalytic systemic change.

Program, product, or transaction designs.

Based on a Value Chain analysis we tailor the design of programs, products, and transactions to lever resources effectively and impactfully within the target market. Solutions have included PPP structures, tax incentives, and new lending products.

Organizational strategic planning, business and financial plans.

We work with motivated social entrepreneurs within the housing space to transform their vision of their entity’s future into an actionable plan for growth, funding, and impact. As markets evolve, entities emerge and grow; as both happen, they often need to expand, diversify, consolidate, or reposition. We support clients in the design of new business lines, business units, capital relationships, and governance relationships.

Project evaluation.

In addition to documenting visible outputs our project evaluation work focuses on identifying the ways in which the project has contributed to ecosystemic improvement.

Thought Leadership

For AHI, our theoretical work must have practical impact, so we focus on issues that parallel and intersect with our consulting work and create a broader knowledge base from which to develop impactful solutions. Studying a problem and reporting on it are not the end of our work, they provide the evidence necessary to develop innovative solutions frameworks and inspire action.

Our Thought Leadership work broadly fits into four categories of action:

Invention.

Identifying new and better solutions to a present problem.

Transmission.

Disseminating information that highlights and integrates the problem, along with real-world cases that display key solution elements.

Adaptation.

Modifying invented and transmitted ideas to fit a specific challenge in a particular country by intertwining the portable elements with local facts, needs, and desires.

Synergy

Bringing together what we see and hear and read about these ideas – critiques, challenges, improvements, variations, and endorsements – to catalyze progress in our field.

Chrysalis Housing Impact Accelerator

The Chrysalis Housing Impact Accelerator is an intensive hands-on engagement between AHI and emerging housing entities, and their leaders, to accelerate their growth, reach, expansion potential, and impact.

Rehousing Ukraine

AHI brings together Ukrainian and global experts in housing, urban planning, finance and post-conflict relief and recovery to discuss the challenges and opportunities that Ukraine’s post-conflict housing reconstruction will bring.

Health Secure Housing

With Health Secure Housing, AHI is pioneering the urgent new national standard and global objective for making the places we live healthy.

AHI’s Health Secure Housing initiative is giving leading owners, funders, philanthropies and policymakers a powerful new lens to organize their action. We have assembled a team of AHI staff and national experts in related domains to housing. Our impact-oriented work includes:

Framework.

Defining Health Secure Housing across the five interconnected dimensions: Medical, physical, operational, informational, and economic/ financial.

Assessment.

Enabling stakeholders to evaluate and rate the condition of the housing they own, manage, fund, regulate, or live in.

Action roadmap.

Developing structured actions that will enable people and entities to work together to improve the health security of their housing and their communities.