LISC - Creating and Financing Affordable Housing
LISC Interview
When Oramenta Newsome came to D.C. in the mid-1990s, the city was careening toward bankruptcy.
There was no shortage of affordable housing because nobody wanted to invest in the city.
As head of the New York-based Local Initiatives Support Corp.'s D.C. office, Newsome's job was to work with an energetic bunch of nonprofits to leverage private-sector investments to finance affordable housing and community development projects.
This is the loudest I have heard them in my 10 years here.
I was recently at the Potomac Conference where the discussion ranged around the issues that the region is facing.
A significant population of lower-income households struggling to maintain a quality of life in their neighborhoods ...wanting investment, wanting people to move in.
They were the ones making the investments in the neighborhoods, in hope that others would make an investment in the neighborhood.
When I came in 1995, we were working so hard to redevelop the vacant housing -- and getting people in there and making it affordable -- and that was hard.
Today, we are trying to make sure that those households and those families that are the working poor, those with special needs are part of, and can live in, the neighborhoods that now have such high investment.
You have to deal with resource development along with trying to have new ideas about how you develop the resources that are out there.
