Predecessor: NYC Acquisition Fund

In 2006, New York City launched the NYC Acquisition Fund, one of the first innovative affordable housing partnerships, to address a critical challenge: by the 2000s, the City had depleted its supply of tax-foreclosed properties carried forward since the 1970s that were traditionally transferred to mission-driven developers. Developers now needed to compete in a hot real estate market to secure development sites but lacked sufficient financial resources to do so.

Traditional public financing was too slow, and financing terms available from private lenders to fund early-stage acquisitions were too restrictive. In response, the City partnered with Enterprise Community Partners, LISC, Forsyth Street, and foundations to create a revolving loan fund blending public guarantees with private capital to deliver fast, flexible acquisition loans at the scale needed to sustain the City’s affordable housing pipeline.

The Fund offered a new model providing tailored bridge financing that allowed affordable housing developers to act quickly, with high loan-to-value ratios covering property acquisition and predevelopment costs, generous maximum loan sizes to support large and costly property acquisitions, and other terms calibrated for affordable and supportive housing projects in high-cost markets. Since launch, the Fund has helped create or preserve over 16,000 affordable homes and established a national model cities could adopt for capital and policy alignment to drive equitable housing development.

Structured as an LLC co-owned by Enterprise and LISC, the Fund operates through a credit committee, on which the fund’s owners, lenders, and the City are represented. Day-to-day fund management services are provided by Forsyth Street. A network of six community development financial institutions (CDFIs) originate loans into the Fund, leveraging the trusted, long-term relationships that those CDFIs have built with the developer community. Public and philanthropic capital expand the flexibility of the Fund’s loan product terms, and private capital from a bank lender syndicate provides scale.