What Does North Carolina Philanthropy Think about Housing?
Intro of Survey Results before the North Carolina Philanthropy Panel (photo below).
At the end of September, North Carolina philanthropies gathered to discuss housing at a convening, A Foundation for Housing, organized by Self-Help, Dogwood Health Trust, Golden LEAF, State Employees Credit Union of North Carolina Foundation, Triangle Community Foundation, and Wells Fargo Foundation.
I was asked to moderate a panel, Foundational Strategies, where philanthropies invested in housing would discuss their leadership and learnings. The next day, I moderated a panel on Philanthropy and Housing at the North Carolina Affordable Housing Conference organized by the North Carolina Affordable Housing Coalition, the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency, and Centrum.
Readers might be interested in key takeaways from these events as philanthropies are important actors in the state’s public sphere, and housing is an important part of our lives and economy. So, let me welcome you in.
The day-long philanthropic convening featured the state of affordable housing in North Carolina, a summary of data available for housing professionals, and case studies of both foundations and other organizations taking leadership roles with housing.
In preparation for this Foundational Strategies panel, I worked with Self-Help to create a survey to NC Philanthropies seeking their views on housing—both on their own work and on the state of housing in NC. I also carried out in-depth discussions with the panelists to better understand their foundations’ views on housing and how we would structure the panel to educate attendees on current philanthropic housing efforts.
Philanthropy is still getting to know the housing space. Although a few foundations have been doing major work in housing in North Carolina, for many, housing has long been seen as complicated and prohibitively high dollar. A low-income housing project might call for millions in gap financing. And that is not an easy amount for many North Carolina foundations, even the large ones.
Relatedly, the benefit from housing goes very directly to several dozen or hundred people, with much lower community or ancillary benefits for those that do not receive the housing. The calculation for foundations has been that they can serve many more people in other ways that spread the benefits more widely.
Additionally, housing is technical, often with multiple regulations and sources of funding that need to be mastered. Foundations don’t always have a lot of capacity to do that necessary homework. And of course, this is to say nothing of the political stakeholder complexities as people feel strongly about changes in neighborhoods and cityscapes.
Philanthropic Leaders in Foundational Strategies Panel
On the Foundational Strategies session, philanthropic leaders of philanthropies engaged with housing: describing their foundations’ journeys from early efforts to get involved with housing to where they are today. The State Employees Credit Union (SECU) Foundation discussed how they had begun with directly investing in housing projects, such as teacher housing—and they still had some of those loans on the books many years later. They had moved to collaborating with trusted intermediaries such as Habitat for Humanity to build larger projects more efficiently, describing this as a learning that it was better to be an enabler of experts rather than be directly financing a mortgages long term to support development.
Yet both SECU Foundation and Golden LEAF highlighted that these larger, more efficient projects were easier to do in cities of at least intermediate size. The need for rural communities to share in the housing progress creates a conundrum. Where the rents aren’t as high to support a project, where local housing capacity and even workforce can be challenged, and where coordinating and educating local leaders can feel like a long uphill mile. Despite these challenges, foundations agreed on both the panel and the survey results that our neighbors live in smaller communities too, and they need a home and economic vibrancy.
Another aspect that stood out from our Foundational Strategies session was that even for some of these foundations acting intentionally around housing, the housing work was new. Triangle Community Foundation (TCF), which generously underwrote the survey of foundations, related that it had very intentionally leaned into housing as one of its strategic plan pillars only in the last two years. For TCF, the Triangle urgently needed more housing affordability, and the usual deliberative way foundations take on issue areas was not ideal. New Hanover Community Endowment similarly related that it felt it was diving into housing, in part a result of being a brand-new foundation that had to quickly make investments.
However, one area in which New Hanover and TCF are quite different are the amount of resources they could bring to bear, with New Hanover deploying millions of dollars in one county and TCF, by nature of being a community foundation, shepherding smaller figures over a region. Both similarly concluded that building capacity, not only large housing projects, was important and an efficient use of funds. In New Hanover, this looked like funding a financial protection law center to grow and keep people in their homes, or a consultant that performs site assessment for accessory dwelling units, to facilitate more of these being built. For TCF, they are facilitating high impact convenings, conversation, and coordination in the Triangle, using not only funds but their convening power to amplify their reach. One lesson then for philanthropy is that investments in housing work are not necessarily investments in large housing projects.
A final highlight from the panel discussion relates back to the learning foundations have accomplished to grow their impact working even better with partnerships, given that housing is such an expensive area and requires much expertise. Foundations reported wrestling with the need to give up some control in the context of those partnerships. Philanthropic leaders acknowledged that it can be easier to play a very central role, which makes it easier to show the community the philanthropy’s efforts directly. This seemed to be a topic where much more discussion could be had, and Dogwood Health Trust relayed its growth in this area, where from strength they could let others take the lead. Working with Dogwood, Self Help is stepping up in helping to manage the post-hurricane-Helene Western North Carolina affordable housing loan program. Dogwood need not manage everything, and the fund can take on additional partners, increasing its efficacy.
What are the next steps for NC Philanthropy regarding housing? The optimist in me hopes that greater coordination with each other, and with broader civil society working in housing might result in a path to increased housing capacity after this convening. There seems to be interest, so my hopes are for another chapter in this story.