Diffusion and Scaling the Housing Accelerator Fund

Effectively scaling the Housing Accelerator Fund model requires:

• Public Sector Alignment and Commitment: Active engagement and sustained financial commitment from local governments are crucial.
• Cross-Sector Collaboration: Establish robust partnerships among public entities, private capital providers, and philanthropic organizations.
• Capacity-Building: Invest in developing local development expertise through training, technical assistance, and shared learning initiatives.
• Continuous Innovation and Adaptation: Regularly assessing local market conditions and investor requirements and adjusting financial products and strategies accordingly.

HAF’s success in San Francisco and its ongoing expansion throughout the Bay Area underscore the model’s replicability for affordable housing delivery nationwide. Jurisdictions facing affordable housing crises can benefit from adopting and adapting the HAF model to their local contexts, creating rapid, scalable, and sustainable impacts on the affordable housing crisis. The HAF model is also being developed and implemented in other jurisdictions. Philadelphia’s Accelerator Fund (PAF) was established in 2019 and operational by 2021. Philadelphia adopted a public-private model; PAF is structured as an independent nonprofit loan fund that coordinates with city agencies but remains beyond city governance. PAF works to both increase affordable housing supply and empower minority developers, with predevelopment loans, acquisition loans, subordinate debt, and construction financing. PAF also offers targeted support services for Black and Brown developers.

More recently, Austin launched a Housing Accelerator Loan Fund (AHALF). This fund is likewise a public-private structure, managed by an existing nonprofit, the Austin Community Foundation. The fund pursues new construction and preservation of affordable housing primarily via short-term, low-cost loans for predevelopment, land acquisition, and construction bridging. AHALF sees itself as filling a gap in funding sources and accelerating the pace of building affordable units.

In Cleveland, the city recently launched the Cleveland Housing Investment Fund (CHIF), an innovative and catalytic public-private partnership between the City of Cleveland, Cleveland LISC, and Key Bank. CHIF’s goal is to create between 2,500 and 3,000 affordable housing units over the next 10 years. Like AHALF, the CHIF program is housed at an existing organization — LISC —to provide a stable foundation for flexible capital.

Austin, Cleveland, and Philadelphia’s efforts, like the San Francisco HAF, seek to increase the speed of affordable housing delivery, leveraging the flexibility of the private sector while staying in concert with the public sector’s goals, and future work of the Task Force will highlight these programs in more depth.