Well-Deserved Recognition

The last few weeks have been busy—but rewarding—for the editors of Affordable Housing Finance. It’s that time of year for judging the annual Readers’ Choice Awards to select some of the nation’s top affordable housing developments and for making the final selections on the magazine’s 2009 Young Leaders.

Response was up this year for nominations for both the Readers’ Choice Awards and the Young Leaders program. I think that’s partly in response to many in the industry wanting to share their good news and promote the work they are doing and the young people taking initiative during these tough economic times.

The 2009 Young Leaders make up a diverse group. Many are developers—both for-profit and nonprofit—spread out across the country, and others are more focused on the policy and finance side. But they all have one thing in common: They are all working toward the common goal of affordable housing. We’ll take a closer look at these individuals in the September issue and talk with them about the challenges they face as young leaders in the affordable housing industry.

Choosing the finalists for the Readers’ Choice Awards, which will appear in the July/August issue of the magazine and on www.housingfinance.com, has been especially challenging this year. These nominations are all worthy, and it’s really hard to pick one project over another when you read about the populations they serve, the services they provide, the communities they change for the better.

But Affordable Housing Finance still has one project to complete this summer: Choosing its 2009 Affordable Housing Hall of Fame inductees, which will be honored at a luncheon concluding the AHF Live conference Oct. 26-28 at the Palmer House in Chicago. The 2009 inductees will join some good company: Richard Baron of McCormack Baron Salazar; the late Terrence Duvernay, who headed the Michigan State Housing Development Authority and the Georgia Housing Finance Agency; Bart Harvey of Enterprise; Conrad Egan of the National Housing Conference; Nic Retsinas of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies; and Reps. Charles Rangel and Barney Frank, to name a few.

Help us add to this great list. If you would like to suggest someone for this honor, please e-mail me at cserlin@hanleywood.com. And stay tuned in the coming months for a closer look at these astonishing and quite deserving people and projects.