Affordable housing has become a family affair for Jesse Elton, director of finance at The Community Builders (TCB). Her father, Nick Elton, is an affordable housing architect at Boston-based Elton + Hampton Architects, and her sister, Margot Elton-Ratliff, is an associate developer at Philadelphia-based Pennrose.
During her college years, she knew she wanted a career path with a social justice bent, and an internship at the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corp. set her on a path in the affordable housing nonprofit world.
Elton, 37, started her career at BRIDGE Housing as a project manager and later worked as a senior program officer at the Local Initiatives Support Corp. She joined TCB in 2014 as a finance project manager and was promoted to director of finance a year ago. In this new role, she leads a team within TCB’s real estate development that structures financially sustainable developments and assists in raising debt and equity. She also manages relationships with the Boston-based nonprofit’s lenders and investors.
Elton especially enjoys the more complex transactions and has been an innovator in structuring deals with a combination of sources, including low-income housing tax credits, New Markets Tax Credits, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Choice Neighborhoods funds. She’s also led an effort to convert TCB’s more than 3,000 public housing units to Section 8 through HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program.
“I like meeting the challenges of structuring strong deals. I feel really lucky to get to come to work every day and engage in activities that I find fun, challenging, and interesting toward a mission of serving vulnerable people in this country,” she says, as well as “working on fostering mixed-income communities where people can thrive. I feel lucky that I get to use this skill set for that mission.”
Outside of the office, Elton is on the board of the Urban Farming Institute Community Land Trust and is an avid bike rider, doing the annual 125-mile Harbor to the Bay ride with her dad to raise funds for HIV/AIDS awareness.
