As the head of a large single-family homebuilding company, Tommy Beadel noticed a troubling reality: The people building and cleaning his firm’s upscale homes were commuting up to two hours to get to work.
The men and women making the city run couldn’t afford to live anywhere close to their jobs.
“What I saw was this need to bring housing into core neighborhoods and give people access to the same schools and the same work centers,” Beadel says.
Three years ago, the co-founder and former CEO of Thomas James Homes pivoted to focus on developing affordable housing. His new firm, HVN Development, completed its first project, a 34-unit development in Los Angeles’ West Adams neighborhood, and started construction on 10 projects with more than 600 units last year.
The upstart firm debuted on Affordable Housing Finance’s AHF 50 list of top developers at No. 34 this year.
HVN, pronounced haven, expects to break ground on another 11 projects with close to 800 units this year. It’s on pace to complete three projects with 124 units this year. All of the company’s projects are in Los Angeles.
It’s an audacious start for the firm. In 2025, Los Angeles approved roughly 8,700 new residential units, a notable drop from previous years. HVN accounted for nearly 10% of those numbers, according to Beadel.
Funding the Gap
Although Beadel has more than 20 years of real estate development experience, he’s a newcomer to affordable housing. And, he set off to do things his way.
He and his team recognized that affordable housing deals typically face a funding gap, so they worked to tackle this math problem.
“When you fund the gap by going to a city and saying I need money, the gap grows,” Beadel says. “The city gets involved and says we want you to design this product and we want you to serve this population. You can go from a property that could be100 units down to 35 units. You go from a property that was income-averaged for a tenant at 60% of the area median income to a lot of permanent supportive housing units. We said let’s privately fund the gap. That’s what we do. I raised equity to privately fund the gap.”
Using private funding enables HVN to control a project’s design and contain costs. Beadel says HVN’s average development hard and soft costs are around $220,000 per unit.
While HVN’s first project was all privately financed, the company has since found its groove pairing 4% housing credits with private gap funding.
Beadel, who describes himself as a “housing disruptor,” says he raised money from a private family office that invested in the platform of HVN, so he’s not raising project-level investments other than the tax credit equity.
“The challenge in the private capital markets is affordable housing is long,” he says. “We do deals and sign 18-year partnership agreements with the tax credit investor. There are not many investors who like to invest and wait 18 years to make their returns. It takes time to find the right capital that understands what the opportunity is and how to scale the opportunity and has a time horizon of an opportunity.”
The company has also used a ground-lease structure on several deals to boost the capital structure.
"HVN is building a unique, efficiently designed and sized product aimed at infill Los Angeles neighborhoods with very little new development and significant unmet demand for affordable housing,” says Steve Wylder, executive vice president and head of investments at Safehold, a leader in the ground-lease industry.
In November, Safehold announced closing on ground leases for six affordable housing communities being developed by HVN. When completed, these properties will provide more than 400 affordable homes.
Beadel admits he encountered skepticism when first approaching LIHTC syndicators and investors, who wanted to see proof that he could execute his deals. State and local regulators said they hoped his formula works but hadn’t seen anyone do this in volume.
Now, that HVN has closed about 14 deals in the last 13 months, everyone has become more comfortable. KeyBank was an early partner, and HVN has since worked with several of the top LIHTC investors and syndicators. On the bond side, the firm has worked with the California Municipal Finance Authority and the California Housing Finance Agency.
Beadel stresses that his way is just one approach.
“There’s so many needs in affordable housing, so many populations that need to be served. It doesn’t just work the way that I want to do it,” he says. “There’s a need for the nonprofits. There’s a need for the for-profits. There’s a need for farmworker housing, for rural, for infill, for seniors. There’s a need for every type of product that exists, but what I wanted to show the market was there’s a way to do it differently and less expensively, and there’s a way to make the dollars we have at the state go further.”
The firm, which has about 20 employees, has also been deliberate in building in Los Angeles.
HVN’s emergence coincides with mayor Karen Bass’ Executive Directive 1 in 2022, which called on the city to adopt reforms to accelerate and lower the cost of building affordable housing. The local focus also means he is working with one building department and one set of rules.
A Matter of Demand
One of HVN’s developments under construction is a community about seven blocks from a Costco Wholesale on Los Angeles’ Westside that employs several hundred people. While visiting the store to learn more, Beadel confirmed that many of the workers endure long commutes to their jobs. This is another example of needing to build affordable housing where people work, he says.
Asked about the risks of his approach, he doesn’t talk about the costs or financing.
“I see more opportunity than I can effectuate on today,” Beadel says. “I see the ability to grow this platform. I see the need to expand outside the city of Los Angeles. How do I do more? I see the people the housing is impacting, the rent savings we can give. But, more is really hard. How do we build the ability to meet the opportunity that exists in the marketplace. There’s so much opportunity. There’s not a demand issue in California.”