Building exteriors and windows

Affordable Housing: How to Develop Multifamily in any Urban Environment

Immerse yourself in the complexity of affordable housing development— discuss, design, and tour real cities and properties.

Aimed at entrepreneurial executives who understand income-producing real estate and see opportunities for profit and impact beyond the narrow confines of currently established US programs, this immersive course both presents affordable housing as a distinctive real estate asset class and opens up new ways that developers, lenders, investors, and stakeholders can create successful properties, programs, and policies.

What to Expect

a group working together on a design of a new property
classroom discussion featuring instructor and participant

Every country in the world needs affordable housing, and every country’s political and economic markets are always changing. Success requires specialist entrepreneurship by people and entities that can truly deliver a double-bottom-line value proposition: better living situations for deserving households alongside economically profitable and sustainable properties. This course puts students to work learning proven principles and applying them immediately in an immersive multi-part case exercise drawn from a real property in a real setting.

Unlike traditional real estate development, where lack of capital can be a barrier to entry, affordable housing is a growing and rapidly evolving business where opportunities can be created, and resources identified and captured, by those who bring ideas, expertise, and energy. Additionally, many markets (both globally and in the US) have a shortage of capable locally-knowledgeable affordable housing specialist developers, lenders, investors, and policymakers – which creates opportunity for new entrants.

All around the world, housing is economic infrastructure, because it is where jobs go to sleep at night. Affordable housing is urban human infrastructure, because that is where essential urban jobs go to sleep at night. Informal housing is where informal jobs go to sleep at night, resulting in the rapid growth of informal neighborhoods and potentially slums. This makes housing both a driver of a growing, sustainable urban economy and a casualty of that same success: the more the economy grows, the more affordable housing is needed, and yet the less naturally does the market produce it. That paradox creates a policy opportunity: sooner or later, every level of government realizes that without affordable housing, the city will become unaffordable and unsustainable, and that it is up to government to create the enabling environment, and provide the critical legal and financial resources, to foster growth of affordable housing.

In turn, that policy response creates business opportunity, because government needs real estate entrepreneurs to turn laws and money (subsidy) into desirable homes and community outcomes. Add to this the world’s emergence into an evolving health-aware built environment and the challenges, and the profitable opportunities, abound – for people and companies that know where to find them, and how to grow them from ideas into transactions.

This course is not market specific. Rather, powered by the instructors’ decades of experience in hundreds of projects in 50+ countries around the world, this course enables participants to zoom out and see the context of their cities’ housing markets, so that they may best understand how to improve it.

  • Learn durable and globally applicable principles, practices, and approaches to change that apply to any urban affordable housing challenge.
  • For US practitioners, get a whole new lens through which to evaluate the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), workforce, mixed-income, and hybrid tenure models such as rent-to-own or shared appreciation.
  • Discover how to adapt principles, practices, and approaches to individual contexts.
  • Draw lessons from dozens of countries around the world, developed and emerging.
  • Use a real-life, multi-part case study that demonstrates the universal aspects of affordable housing and the crucial details of its local application.
  • Master the universal fundamentals of affordable housing, and understand how they can be adapted by place, policy, and laws – enabling participants to analyze the housing models needed in their changing cities
  • Frame affordable housing for external stakeholders as an imperative where they should act to help. Understand the pathways by which political or market desires can be converted into successful housing developments.
  • Recognize development and redevelopment opportunities in an urban context. Identify financial and subsidy resources that, if tapped, turn uneconomic eyesores into profitable development opportunities.
  • Decide whether and how to enter or expand your company’s or agency’s involvement with affordable housing.
  • US affordable housing executives who are sure there is more to life than just the next cookie-cutter LIHTC property.
  • Global executives from anywhere in the world whose work connects to housing and urbanization.
  • Developers, financiers, investors, urban planners, government officials (national, state/ provincial, or municipal/local), and real estate professionals (e.g., attorneys, accountants, appraisers) working in these fields.
  • Domain experts in health, municipal development, insurance, or economic development who have discovered that affordable housing is essential to what they do and who need to understand how to approach incumbents without being trapped in jargon or old, static ways that are not addressing current challenges.
  • Housing organization board members, executives leading regional housing commitments at large companies, and executives leading shelter networks seeking to transition from relief to redevelopment or revitalization.
  • Session 1: Affordable housing and 21st century cities
  • Session 2: Housing’s value chains and making them work
  • Session 3: Finding the money: making private-sector economics profitable and the role of government
  • Session 4: Affordable housing now and into the future
  • Lecture (orientation)
  • Case work (building layers of understanding)
  • Report-out (pros and cons, tensions, decisions for case purposes)
  • Way forward (what comes next, what to think about beforehand)

Instructors


Headshot of David Smith

David Smith

Founder and CEO, Affordable Housing Institute (AHI)


Headshot of Anya Brickman Raredon

Anya Brickman Raredon

President, Affordable Housing Institute


Headshot of Sanjana Sidhra

Sanjana Sidhra

Senior Analyst, Affordable Housing Institute


David Smith Introduces the Course


Participant Stories

Headshot of Tim Foote

Tim Foote

Realtor and Property Developer

Headshot of Vince Nguyen

Vince Nguyen

Business Strategist

Miami-Dade County Public Housing and Community Development (PHCD)

Alex R. Ballina and Nathan Kogon

Affordable Housing: How to Develop Multifamily in any Urban Environment

February 7, 9, 12, & 14, 2024 | 11:00am – 2:00pm Eastern

Online 
Tuition:  $1,950
CEUs: 10 AIA LUs (HSW), 10 AICP/CM, 10 LA/CES (HSW)
AMDP Elective Units: 1


Sign up for program updates

Please sign up above if you would like to be notified when the next session is announced.

Discounts & Deadlines

To maximize the impact of this program, there is a social impact discount of 15% off the listed tuition that applies to many individuals who work in developing countries and organizations impacting housing affordability.

Please email us at [email protected] with any questions and to ask about group signup.

Registration Deadline: 3 hours before the start of the program.

Full Discount and Cancellation Policies