FEATURE

Rice, Yordán Take Reins at Enterprise

AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • June 2008

BY ANDRE SHASHATY

A former mayor of Seattle and an investment banker from New York have taken over leadership of the affordable housing and community development organizations founded 25 years ago by James Rouse, the legendary commercial real estate developer who revitalized historic sections of Boston, Baltimore, and other Eastern cities in the 1970s.

Norman B. Rice, the former politician, became chairman of Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., this spring, taking over for Rouse’s hand-picked successor as chairman, Bart Harvey. Investment banker Jaime E. Yordán became chairman of Enterprise Community Investment, Inc., the for-profit subsidiary of Enterprise Community Partners.

Harvey left the position of president and CEO of Enterprise Community Partners in January 2007. That post is now held by Doris Koo. Enterprise Community Investment is run by Jeffrey H. Donahue.

Rice told AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE he is prepared to take on the task of seeing Enterprise through a time of challenge for the American economy and for affordable housing development.

He said the board will be working on determining the organization’s strategy and positioning it for the next 20 years. Its main goals are to expand and preserve the supply of affordable homes, including service- enriched housing for the homeless, lobbying Congress on home mortgage foreclosures, and maintaining leadership in making homes and communities more green, he added.

Rice is former president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle. Prior to that, he was mayor of Seattle and served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

While in office from 1990 to 1997, Rice “championed for an improved public school system; breathed new life into Seattle’s downtown with new retail centers, housing, and civic buildings; and implemented a model welfare-to-work program,” according to Enterprise. Prior to his election as mayor, Rice served three terms as a member of the Seattle City Council and two years as council president.

Rice is the Distinguished Visiting Practitioner at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.

Yordán is vice chairman of Global Banking Latin America for Citi Global Markets, Inc. He told AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE he has always believed in giving back to the community.

For many years, he focused his volunteer work on education. In the 1990s, Yordán said he decided to refocus his volunteer work on alleviating poverty, so he went looking for advice on how best to do that.

One of the people he contacted was Harvey. The two had met in the 1960s, when they both attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pa. Harvey got him involved with an advisory group for Enterprise in New York and then asked him to become a trustee for Enterprise Community Partners.

When the call came asking Yordán to chair Enterprise Community Investment, he felt it was a natural fit given his experience with capital markets.

Yordán is a former general partner and managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he started the Latin America practice for the firm in New York in 1990. Prior to his 15-year tenure at Goldman, he worked in various positions at JPMorgan, which he joined in 1975. He has served as co-chair of Enterprise’s New York Advisory Board since 2001. Yordán holds an MBA from Harvard and an AB from Hamilton College.

Both Rice and Yordán said Enterprise is in great shape as it celebrates its 25th anniversary. They said they envision making no major changes in direction. Their top priority will be to fine-tune their operations to cope with a changing business climate, as it has become harder to raise equity investment and liquidity in the credit markets has diminished.

Enterprise works with nonprofit and for-profit developers, community organizations, corporate investors, and government to provide development capital via equity and debt products and technical expertise in community development practices. Products and services include predevelopment and acquisition lending, permanent financing, low-income housing tax credit equity, mezzanine debt, New Markets Tax Credit equity, and asset management.

After his tenure as chair, Harvey will remain on Enterprise Community Partners’ board and will chair the Enterprise Real Estate Advisory Council. Harvey was inducted into this magazine’s Affordable Housing Hall of Fame in 2006.

Enterprise at a Glance

Over the last 25 years, Enterprise Community Investment, Inc., has privately raised more than $8 billion to finance more than 225,000 affordable rental and for-sale homes, create vital communities, and help transform the lives of low-income Americans, particularly those at the lowest end of the economic scale. Enterprise is investing in communities at a rate of nearly $1 billion a year.

• Enterprise has raised more than $6.5 billion in low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) equity through more than 95 investment funds and financed more than 1,400 LIHTC properties totaling more than 86,000 affordable housing units under asset management.
• Enterprise is a leader in green affordable housing through its Green Communities initiative, a five-year, $555 million commitment to build green affordable homes for lowincome families nationwide. To date, Enterprise has helped build more than 9,200 green homes in 220 development projects representing more than $430 million in equity.
• In addition to expanding and strengthening supportive housing for people with special needs, Enterprise develops best practices in the design and delivery of resident services, including helping residents complete their education, obtain better jobs, and achieve financial independence.
• Preservation of affordable housing is a vital component of revitalizing communities. Enterprise is helping to keep housing affordable and prevent market-rate conversions through a variety of approaches, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Sec. 202 refinancing, Year 15 disposition strategies, and innovative public-private partnerships.
• Enterprise is now an approved U.S. Department of Agriculture Sec. 538 Rural Development lender and delivers Federal Housing Administration multifamily and healthcare loan products as a HUD-approved Multifamily Accelerated Processing lender. Also available from Enterprise is a proprietary non-agency construction and permanent financing product for multifamily properties, in addition to its Fannie Mae Delegated Underwriting and Servicing product offering.
• Enterprise’s multifamily lending portfolio has resulted in more than $436 million in financing to create approximately 15,000 affordable apartments and homes nationwide. This portfolio includes multifamily mortgages for new construction, preservation, and rehabilitation, as well as the building of green affordable housing.