After her first year of law school, Anne Segrest McCulloch worked at Georgia Legal Services, cataloging every rental housing unit in the state that had federal subsidies attached to it.
It didn’t matter if the property was involved in a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program or supported by the Rural Housing Service, she diligently made a record of it in the summer of 1982.
In the years following, McCulloch would run across many of those same properties during an exceptional career that has included influential roles at HUD, Fannie Mae, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the Resolution Trust Corp.
“It’s important to me to do work that has scale and impact, that can change lives, change markets, at scale across communities,” she says.
More than that, McCulloch says she’s also needed the tangible stories about people. “There has to be a human impact, a community impact,” she says. “Housing does both.”
Today, she’s president and CEO of the Housing Partnership Equity Trust (HPET), a Washington, D.C.-based social purpose real estate investment trust that acquires and preserves affordable housing in partnership with leading nonprofit apartment owners.
McCulloch joined HPET in 2017 following an 18-year career at Fannie Mae, where she held several high-level roles, including deputy general counsel for its vast multifamily finance business.
Lasting Work
As chief of staff to former CEO Daniel Mudd and chairman Stephen Ashley, McCulloch led a team of executives to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Fannie Mae was one of the largest investors in the region, holding a sizable mortgage debt and serving as a major low-income housing tax credit investor at the time. In addition, the company had millions of more dollars of apartment and home loans in process when the storm struck. The company had to make a series of decisions about keeping the money flowing and how to handle losses when it was unknown if the properties were still even standing.
This early trip, which took place when flights and hotels were barely in service, was critical in Fannie Mae making $78 billion in investment in the Gulf Coast over the next five years. With those investments, the firm was able to significantly reduce its projected losses by keeping deals flowing and help the region recover.
It was a pivotal moment for McCulloch, who had lived on the Gulf Coast and started her legal career there representing community and environmental groups. The work also likely had ripple effect in other parts of the country.
“Anne was instrumental in putting together the framework around Fannie Mae’s disaster response that helped in the rebuilding, particularly affordable housing, in those hard-hit areas after Katrina,” says Ralph Perrey, executive director of the Tennessee Housing Development Agency. “I believe that template has continued at Fannie Mae as a model for their response to other natural disasters where large amounts of housing have been lost.”
Following the big Smoky Mountains fire in 2016, many of the same resources were brought to Tennessee, says Perrey, who first crossed paths with McCulloch when both were working at Fannie Mae. They now both serve on the board of the National Housing Conference.
In another move, McCulloch was involved in helping develop an umbrella agreement between Fannie Mae and state housing finance agencies (HFAs) that made it easier for HFAs to originate affordable loans backed by Fannie Mae, according to Perrey.
“Her heart is the in the business of affordable housing, but so is her head,” he says. “She recognizes that if we are going to involve the private sector as builders, as investors, and as partners in developing and preserving affordable housing, that dollars and cents have to add up. The deal has to pencil out, and it has to be safe and sound. By bringing the commitment to build and preserve affordable housing and the practical aspect that it has to make sense, Anne has been very effective. That is an approach that partners value, and it’s how you get things done.”
As senior vice president for credit and housing access at Fannie Mae, McCulloch also worked with a team that nurtured the HomeReady mortgage program that recognized the economic power of families that lived in multigenerational households. It was a move that allowed households with grandparents and extended family members or other nontraditional households to become homeowners.
“That’s the function of the government-sponsored enterprises, to look at the country we have and what its credit needs are and figure out how to meet those needs,” she says. “It’s not to say this is who we were in 1965.”
At HUD, she was a senior adviser brought in to work on a large Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan sales program. She also helped establish the Mark-to-Market program, which helps preserve housing affordability by restructuring FHA-insured or HUD-held mortgages.
“Anne would walk in my office sounding like a community organizer and would have left the room viewed as a banker with a heart,” says Nic Retsinas, former FHA commissioner.
McCulloch, who is married with two adult children, calls herself “generically Southern.” Born in Alabama, she grew up in Georgia and spent summers on a farm in Mississippi. Her parents were community activists involved in the Civil Rights movement in Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s and later worked on Appalachian economic development and education issues. Her Presbyterian minister father finished his career working with farmworkers in the Arkansas Delta.
McCulloch couldn’t have predicted her career path. Instead, she says she’s been open to taking on new opportunities, and she’s been fortunate to be surrounded by exceptional colleagues.
“Housing is a team sport,” she says. “You don’t do it by yourself.”
She’s looking forward to working on more challenges in an evolving industry, and just maybe a familiar deal from Georgia will find her desk.
