The essence of our mission has not changed in the eleven years since I came to work at the California Housing Partnership: to assist nonprofit and government housing agencies to create and preserve housing affordable to low-income Californians while providing leadership on affordable housing finance issues.
What has changed is our understanding of the importance of both directly providing expert technical assistance in financing the creation and preservation of affordable rental homes and using the knowledge from those transactions to advocate for improvements to the policies and programs that define how this work can be done.
In 2002, the California Housing Partnership had five financial consultants but no staff dedicated to working on policy advocacy and program improvement. Today, we have ten financial consultants and six policy and program staff working to improve federal and state programs in ways that are beginning to pay significant public benefit dividends in the areas of location and energy efficiency.