ROLES: Co-founder and board member of Texas Housing Conservancy and special adviser to the Mueller Foundation. Prior roles include founder of Central Texas Mutual Housing Association, now Foundation Communities, and longtime vice president of national real estate programs at NeighborWorks America
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
IN HER OWN WORDS: “With housing, you could do something that changed lives, made a lot of lives better. With time, I began to realize that you can make a whole city better."
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Frances Ferguson has built several of Texas’ most important affordable housing organizations.
She is the common thread that weaves through Foundation Communities, HousingWorks Austin, Texas Housing Conservancy, and other organizations that provide housing opportunities across the state and beyond.
“There are few individuals whose influence on affordable housing has been as broad, as enduring, and as quietly transformative as Frances’,” says Monica Medina, president and CEO of the Texas Housing Conservancy. “While many leaders can point to a successful development or organization they helped create, Frances has spent her career building the institutions, partnerships, and leaders that have shaped the affordable housing landscape for decades.”
While the organizations she established grew in prominence across the industry, Ferguson was the one who worked diligently behind the scenes, making them possible.
For her lasting contributions, she is being inducted into Affordable Housing Finance’s Hall of Fame.
From Student Co-Ops to Affordable Family Housing
Ferguson’s housing journey began at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she lived in the student-run co-ops. An alternative to dormitories, the co-ops promoted a more collaborative approach with students sharing in the operation and governance of their housing and dining.
“I remember walking in the front door of this co-op where I was going to live and instantly feeling like I was at home and thinking this is where I belong,” she says. “I didn’t know it was going to lead to working in housing.”
Ferguson became a leader at the co-op system, which served one-third of Oberlin’s students. This led to her being hired by a national alliance of housing cooperatives in Michigan. From there, she moved to Austin with the intent of bringing some of the co-op principles to develop affordable housing for families.
She founded the Central Texas Mutual Housing Association (CTMHA) amid the real estate market crash and the savings-and-loan crisis of the mid-1980s. Recognizing she needed more business expertise, she also went back to school to earn a master’s in real estate and finance at the University of Texas.
It took seven years and finding NeighborWorks America to provide strategic resources to grow the small, unstaffed fund. CTMHA managed to buy its first property in 1989. “I knew we were now here to stay,” says Ferguson. The business model at that time in the market was to acquire the properties and self-manage. As the real estate market firmed up in the early 1990s, the organization added resident services.
That startup is now Foundation Communities, one of the country’s premier nonprofit housing developers and service providers.
“She set our culture, that our properties should shine, that they should be a place where everybody is proud to live,” says executive director Walter Moreau, who took the helm from Ferguson in 1997. “The properties should be financially sustainable so we reinvest in keeping them in great shape. … That all came from Francie’s vision.”
Ferguson took that vision to the national stage at NeighborWorks America, a network of nonprofits from across the country. Originally focused on neighborhood revitalization and expanding single-family homeownership, the organization tapped Ferguson in 1998 to launch its multifamily initiative.
A Driving Force
The guiding philosophy of the multifamily initiative was that well-run rental communities were good for residents, for owners, for neighborhoods—and ultimately for the housing patterns of the cities they served. Over the next 23 years, she served as vice president of national real estate programs, working alongside Harold Nassau, a guru of asset management, and others to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations. In addition to bolstering asset management practices, they helped build a network to support strategic thinking about resident programs as well as NeighborWorks Capital to provide capital for multifamily developments.
With support of the MacArthur Foundation, Ferguson also helped develop Strength Matters, a nationally recognized program that is the nonprofit housing industry’s go-to source for financial learning. Today, the collaboration convenes more than 200 finance leaders representing 130 organizations to strengthen their capacity and advance best practices across the industry. It has been essential in helping nonprofits improve their financial reporting and standards—and therefore their access to capital.
Simultaneously, back home, HousingWorks Austin was being formed as a cross-sector leadership, research, policy, and advocacy group. Ferguson served as founding chair for several years, until permanent staffing could be afforded. HousingWorks has led the drive for multiple housing bonds and numerous density policies, making Austin a leader in urban housing affordability.
Most recently, Ferguson took aim at solving another affordable housing problem—how to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing. That led to the launch of Texas Housing Conservancy (TxHC), a first-of-its-kind equity fund focused on preserving workforce housing in the state.
“What wasn’t available was equity,” she explains. “You need the first dollar. You need the equity that’s willing to take the risk to buy the property. … We needed real equity that could move first if we were going to save these properties when they became available to be saved.”
She convinced real estate and investment veteran David H. Steinwedell to become involved by driving him around Austin and showing him affordable housing developments, including those developed by Foundation Communities.
It was eye-opening for Steinwedell, who admits he was expecting to see run-down properties. Instead, he was shown high-quality communities.
“One of my comments was, ‘This is institutional-grade real estate,’” he recalls. “Frances replied, ‘See, there should be fund to invest in this.’”
That led to the start of a community task force and the eventual creation of TxHC. Steinwedell became a co-founder and the first CEO of the fund, which so far has invested in 17 properties totaling almost 3,000 units with a gross value of about $500 million.
Without this support, these properties were at risk of losing their affordability, according to Steinwedell, chairman of the TxHC board, which includes Ferguson and others with affordable housing experience in addition to members from the institutional investing world.
“Frances is our rock,” he says. “She makes sure we’re thinking about the needs of the residents and reminding us that we need to maintain as much affordability as we can.”
The fund is structured so that 51% of the units it invests in must be affordable, but it has shot well past that mark by nearing 80%, according to Steinwedell.
The nonprofit was named the 2025 Charity Partner of the Year by the Texas Alternative Investment Association.
More Work to Do
Today, Ferguson also serves on the board at HousingWorks Austin and is senior adviser at the Mueller Foundation, a nonprofit that stewards the affordable homeownership component of the 700-acre redevelopment of Austin’s former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport.
“I’m deeply grateful to have been able to live a career that’s been able to keep expanding,” she says. “I’ve been able to work locally and then nationally and then locally again, in all these different ways, and yet do so in a way that’s been built on principles of business sustainability.”
In Austin, she is surrounded by her family and friends and church that happens to run a homeless mission.
Across her many roles, Ferguson continues to do what she has done throughout her career—bring people together, build support for affordable housing, and help create the conditions for others to succeed.