Since 2022, Robin Hughes has been president and CEO of the Housing Partnership Network (HPN), a national collaborative of the nation’s top mission-driven, nonprofit housing developers, community lenders, and advocates. She helps fuel the work of more than 100 urban and rural housing and community development organizations, practitioner-led learning and data-sharing strategies, and critical advocacy on state and federal policy priorities to drive systems change.
Earlier, Hughes served as head of Abode Communities, growing the organization into one of the top nonprofit developers in the country and a premier provider of environmentally sustainable affordable housing in California.
1. What issue have you and HPN been spending the most time on this year?
We recently launched a new strategic plan—a framework grounded in where our members are today in terms of the headwinds that are challenging their organizations, their properties, and their communities, while being aspirational and visionary for the future. The core of our work—supporting nonprofit developers, operators, and lenders—continues to be the same, but we’re looking for more impactful results because of the urgency that the sector is facing right now. We’re continuing to work to strengthen our members and support their local impact. We’re focused on ways to help members accelerate their work.
We’re also focusing on advancing housing justice and racial equity. This includes working with our members to increase homeownership opportunities, especially for people of color, and economic mobility for residents living in rental housing. We are also advancing racial equity and housing justice in our advocacy and policy work.
On the housing supply side, our members have been concerned about resources to produce new housing as well as preserving the housing that they’ve built over the last three decades. We’re very much focused on how we can support them in coming up with solutions given the stressors they are facing.
I’m also excited about HPN’s focus on systems change. We have been working in the same housing delivery system for decades. Someone recently told me that if you look at the organizational chart for the Department of Housing and Urban Development when it was created and the one for today, not much has changed. As we know, the housing credit programs continue to be oversubscribed with the demand outstripping the availability of credits. We’ve become a really strong and sophisticated sector, but we need to invest in and unleash the capacity of affordable housing developers if we are to really deliver what the country needs.
2. You have talked publicly about the need to disrupt the status quo in order to really respond to the housing crisis. What do you mean by that? What kind of disruption would be positive?
Our system continues to lag behind the crisis. We’re just not building enough housing. Of course, we’ve been under-resourced. There just isn’t enough public capital to support the housing needs and demands nor the robust pipelines that affordable housing developers have created over time. As a sector, I think we’ve done a good job of holding on to what we have and being additive, whether it’s the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program or preserving homes. It’s time for that next big thing that will drive transformative systems change in our work. That could be a combination of regulatory changes within the housing system. It could be new financing resources, which are absolutely needed. It requires a national housing strategy that gets us to a place where we are producing enough homes to meet the needs of this country.
We need public policies that recognize how housing subsidies have been concentrated for people with higher income levels, rather than people with lower incomes. We need a system that supports a continuum of housing. We still must bridge the gap between unsheltered people living on the street and permanent housing, and we need to produce homeownership and market-rate opportunities on the other side of the spectrum. We are having conversations with peer organizations across the country to answer the question: What are the next big transformative things that will help us produce these results.
3. What’s on your policy wish list?
We have three primary buckets of policy priorities—to expand and preserve rental housing; to expand homeownership and wealth building opportunities, especially for underserved communities of color; and to invest in community development.
On the rental side, we continue to advocate for expanding the LIHTC program. The HOME program is really critical as well. We are advocating for subsidies to go to lower-wage workers in the form of vouchers so they can access and make choices about where they live. We want some portion of that to be project-based for the long-term viability of our members’ properties.
On the homeownership side, we’re advocating for Congress to pass an equitable homeownership bill. The one that’s out there now is the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act. We want to see low-wealth households be able to move into homeownership, particularly BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and other people of color) families.
There’s also a host of community development tools that we hope will be expanded or made permanent, including a range of programs that come out of Treasury, like the CDFI Financial Assistance Program, New Markets Tax Credits, and the Capital Magnet Fund.
The other thing that we all know is coming is tax reform. Some of the measures that were approved under the Trump administration will expire in 2025. I would love to see us think about how to expand a housing package as part of a tax bill that is additive to the LIHTC program. Is there an opportunity in this moment to think about what a strong housing tax bill would look like?
HPN knows we can’t do this alone. We’re collaborating with national housing policy leaders to reimagine our housing system. This coalition is working toward a national housing policy that will transform how we deliver housing with the ultimate goal of ensuring access to affordable homes in communities of choice, where there are opportunities for jobs, good schools, and access to green space and vibrant commercial areas. There’s more to come on that.
4. What risks or trends could impact the capacity of developers, particularly nonprofit housing organizations, to meet local housing needs in the coming years?
This issue has become a high priority for HPN and our members. As we were working on our strategic framework, we continued to hear about the many stressors that organizations are facing. At the same time, those same organizations have developed strong pipelines of new projects. They’re pushing forward, even as they are dealing with headwinds.
Some of the challenges are external and outside of their control. Increases in operating costs, especially insurance, is a big challenge for a number of our members. Rent arrears continue to be a problem in some parts of the country, where tenants are not paying their rent or are going through the eviction process, which can take up to a year-plus in some communities.
All of that can delay progress on pipelines, which also means delays in receiving developer fees. Our members are doing stress analysis on their properties, their pipelines, and their organizations to understand the implications of these stressors and do what they can to mitigate them. We think that collective information will help encourage creative solutions, which will require government, business, and, in the case of nonprofits, philanthropy to move forward.
In some places, our members are doing fine. But, with so many headwinds and stressors, the focus of the CEOs of these organizations is around when to course-correct and how to address new challenges. This includes reaching out to local officials to explain why the sector needs better support and reaching out to state housing finance agencies to advocate for relief. They are being strategic on how to solve problems.
I think this may be a bit of a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment: If we don’t have a healthy infrastructure of experienced, mission-driven developers and lenders, we won’t have a chance of addressing the housing crisis or supporting the kind of economic opportunity and growth that our communities need. They are part of the same whole.
5. How will affordable housing development be different 10 years from now?
We have to talk about the hoped-for impact of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). In a decade, I think we will see more climate-resilient, environmentally healthy affordable housing. GGRF is an opportunity to bring resources to existing portfolios, to focus on decarbonization and climate resiliency, and to upgrade the existing affordable housing stock overall. Housing providers have properties that are 20 to 30 years old that need improvement, and this is an opportunity to help support this aging stock. It will also help new projects reach levels of environmental resilience that we haven’t seen in the past and in places that are deeply affected by climate events in addition to long-standing economic challenges.
I am an optimist. This work that we’re doing in collaboration with other policy leaders is driven by that optimism. Where do we want to be a decade from now? Forget the politics and the constraints. Let’s think big about where we want the sector to be, how we want billions of dollars to come into the sector, where we want reform within our housing agencies, and where we want more equity in how we deliver housing. I think that we can get there if we work together.
