Promoting a Rare Breed: Private Nonprofit Housing Developers in the GCC

This piece was originally published by Jadaliyya, an ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute. Jadaliyya combines local knowledge, scholarship, and advocacy to better understand the Arab World and to fulfill its dedication to discussing the Arab world on its own terms. The original article can be found here.

           

By Maysa Sabah Shocair, AHI’s Managing Director of the GCC Region

While working as a Project Manager at the Fenway Community Development Corporation (CDC) in Boston and as a Consultant to Phipps Houses in New York City, I experienced firsthand how nonprofit developers can contribute to preserving housing affordability in central locations. Fenway CDC builds and preserves housing and champions local projects that engage the entire Fenway community in protecting the neighborhood’s economic and racial diversity. It has operated since 1973 and has developed nearly six hundred homes, housing approximately 1,500 low and moderate-income [1] residents, including those with special needs. In addition, Fenway CDC has supported residents through offering job placement and career advancement services, building playgrounds, running after-school programs for teens and operating a center for seniors. Similarly, Phipps Houses develops, owns and manages housing in New York City. Since its  founding in 1905, it has developed more than six thousand apartments for low- and moderate-income families, valued at over one billion US dollars. Phipps Houses manages a housing portfolio of nearly ten thousand apartments throughout New York City. In addition, it serves over eleven thousand children, teens, and adults annually through educational, work readiness, and family support programs.

Now that I am working in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as an affordable housing consultant for several public and private entities, I often wonder: Could private nonprofit housing developers, like the Fenway CDC and Phipps Houses, make an impactful contribution to bridging the supply and demand gap in affordable housing in the GCC for both citizens and non-citizens? Could the experience of other countries with nonprofit housing developers be distilled and adapted to the GCC states?

To answer these questions, I will first discuss the main attributes of nonprofit housing developers, followed by a discussion on the shortage of affordable housing for citizens and non-citizens in the GCC and the resulting need for nonprofit housing developers. I will then recommend strategies to enable the growth of nonprofit housing developers and end with a few concluding remarks. 

Domed roofs in Haram City

Nonprofits Housing Developers as Mission Entrepreneurial Entities

In its 2010 landmark study Mission Entrepreneurial Entities: Essential Actors in Affordable Housing Delivery, the Affordable Housing Institute (AHI) defined Mission Entrepreneurial Entities (MEEs) as “private nongovernment entities that are in the business of making housing ecosystemic change by doing actual transactions valuable in themselves that also serve as pilots and proof of concept.” MEEs could be Non-Governmental Organizations, Community Development Corporations, or Housing Associations, labels that have sometimes been used interchangeably. The study profiles twenty-three MEEs in the United Kingdom and the United States, where, in both countries, there has been a steady migration from entirely publicly managed and operated systems to hybrid public-private models, with MEEs as key delivery mechanisms.

According to the study, the three main attributes of MEEs are: (i) being mission oriented, since their goal is impact, not just profits; (ii) entrepreneurship, taking risks and persuading established institutions, including governments, to approve proposals, provide capital, etc.; and (iii) self-containment, because sustainable MEEs must make profits and maintain a positive cash flow. However, generated profits are used to further the purposes of the organizations instead of being distributed to managers and shareholders.

MEEs also share the following strengths:

·         Willingness to serve populations that the private for-profit sector cannot or will not serve, including the hardest-to-house residents;

·         Commitment to providing affordable housing to lower income people for the long term;

·         Building strong connections with residents and the communities they serve;

·         Commitment to providing various social services that lower income or special needs residents may require;

·         Potential for accessing affordable land, buildings and funding through governments and philanthropic entities or individuals;

·         Commitment to seeing projects through both during their early and post-delivery phases.

Given the potential of MEEs to serve populations that are not served by private or public housing provision, this essay discusses the potential relevance of this model to the GCC countries. This interrogation is critical at a time during when many GCC countries are facing a shortage of housing for low and moderate income households. It is also a time in which we are witnessing the emergence of institutionalized charitable giving that could be in part harnessed to help with housing provision. These conditions are creating a ripe environment for the growth of nonprofit housing developers, with the much needed support of the public and private sectors.

Secession: the key to more affordable housing in cities?

By Judy Park, Analyst

Panelists at The Atlantic’s CityLab 2014 conference, held this past September, proposed the idea of home rule – or even more radically, city secession – as a potential solution for increasing affordable housing in cities.

Click ­­­­­­­­­here for the full article.

During the event, Vishaan Chakrabarti of SHoP Architects and Ben Hecht of Living Cities argued that state and national governance often restricts the ability of cities to produce more affordable housing. The solution, they claim, is to emancipate these cities and allow them to subsidize as they please:

“Subsidize the supply, subsidize the demand: We know how to do all of those. We just don’t have the will to do those things,” said Living Cities CEO Ben Hecht. “Singapore and Hong Kong are willing to do those things.”

The thought that cities would be more effective if left to their own devices is not new. In a time where urbanization is widening the physical and sociopolitical discrepancy between the city and its surroundings, and where cities are increasingly outpacing the GDP of entire countries, it makes some sense.

But good governance is tricky and inevitably context-specific. Home rule could be exactly what that blue bastion in a sea of red needs to build more affordable housing. Unconstrained by state and national regulations, a city could more easily raise and borrow money from their tax base and capital markets. It could vote to direct more money to affordable housing needs.

In other instances, however, the state’s ability to override local priorities and decisions is important and beneficial for affordable housing, as in the case of Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B, a statute that allows an affordable housing developer to obtain state zoning overrides for building in municipalities that fail to meet their 10% affordable housing requirement.

Further, in choosing Singapore and Hong Kong as their poster-children, the panelists seem to imply that the production of mass public housing indicates success: in Singapore, 82% of citizens live in flats built by the government (via the Housing Development Board, or HDB), and in Hong Kong, this figure is slightly less than half.

But all is not well, especially in Hong Kong, which still suffers from a high shortage of public housing and recently won its fourth successive crown for having the most unaffordable housing in the world. Supply may be high, but demand is even higher. Those who are able to qualify for a government flat typically wait three years or more. In the meantime, many residents have no choice but to live in grossly overcrowded units, which have been referred to as cages, that average around 40 square feet. Such housing may technically qualify as “affordable,” but it is certainly not suitable.

Soaring, high-density public housing in Hong Kong.

Society for Community Organization, a local advocacy group, documents the conditions in the cage homes of Hong Kong. Photo by Benny Lam, for the Society for Community Organization.

What we’re reading: “‘Poor Door’ in a New York Tower Opens a Fight Over Affordable Housing”

Where is the line between incentivizing private-sector development of affordable housing and subsidizing (or promoting) more discriminatory, exclusionary housing practices?  Like many big cities, New York is trying to find out. One of its most recent gray areas is 40 Riverside Boulevard, a 22-story mixed-income development in Manhattan that was built under an inclusionary zoning program and will include a separate entrance – a so-called ‘Poor Door’ – for the low-income or subsidized renters. Read more in the excerpts below or in the full article in the New York Times.

The so-called poor door has brought an outcry, with numerous officials now demanding an end to the strategy. But the question of how to best incorporate affordable units into projects built for the rich has become more relevant than ever as Mayor Bill de Blasio seeks the construction of 80,000 new affordable units over the next 10 years.

The answer is not a simple one. As public housing becomes a crumbling relic of another era, American cities have grown more reliant on the private sector to build housing for the poor and working class. Developers say they can maximize their revenues, and thus build more affordable units, by separating them from their luxury counterparts.

…….But Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor for housing and economic development, said that separate front doors were not in keeping with the administration’s principles of equality, and that the city was working to change the rules to prohibit them. “Walking into a building should not be any different based on income status,” Ms. Glen said in an interview.

It’s a difficult issue that has divided even members of the affordable housing community. But what do you think? Should developers be able to use separate entrances for market-rate and subsidized apartments? If it is not okay to have separate entrances for apartments, is it okay if the market-rate units are condos? Read the full article on The New York Times website here and let us know what you think in the comments below!