I need to push back on the narrative about nonprofit housing heroes. In your effort to champion systems reform, you draw a line that doesn't need to exist—suggesting that nonprofit housing workers are exhausted and stuck in triage mode. You say we're too tired and busy with our charitable helping professions to tackle root causes.
That's not the full story. The nonprofit housing leaders I know are not just helping one person at a time or building and preserving affordable housing one house at a time. We are—and have been—reshaping how housing gets done from the grassroots to the system level through advocacy, principled action, and innovation. We're not sidelined by symptom management.
Nonprofit Housing Leaders Are Trusted Advocates for System Change
Because nonprofits are "community-owned," we must consistently refine and renegotiate our respective cases for support with a diverse set of stakeholders. While that can be exhausting, it also serves as a means of educating the broader civil society and policymakers about housing needs and barriers to development in our communities. Public awareness and feedback is where good policy change begins.
In Grand Rapids, for example, nonprofit developers were first to respond to concerns from grassroots neighborhood leaders. We began advocating for zoning reforms in 2018, ahead of the city's Housing NOW! legislation and years before other groups like the Chamber got involved in zoning reform work.
Nonprofit Housing Leaders Build for Marginalized People, Not Financial Margins
Your post argues that the answer is abundance—I agree, but who gets to it first? Less-regulated supply doesn't automatically lead to fairness in housing. You named it in your article: big developers depend on scarcity for high returns.
Even if our communities solve the problems created by zoning constraints, inflated material and labor costs, high interest rates, and investors' demands for good ROI force big developers to build housing for the "high-end" of the market first. They assume that the benefits of added supply will trickle down to those with fewer means, passively addressing the needs of those with the most of them.
Nonprofit leaders don't build for speculation first or prioritize investor ROI. We build with a passion for sustainability and stewardship. We intentionally leverage as many resources as possible to build for those in the most need first. We need intentional, inclusive housing development—grounded in community voice and aimed at uplifting those most at risk of being pushed out.
Successful big developers, and even the small army of small-scale builders, are averse to the risk that "risky tenants" might represent to their bottom line.
Nonprofit Housing Leaders Do More With Less and Create New Approaches
Nonprofit leaders aren't just building one house at a time with existing public tools like LIHTC and HUD programs. We leverage those tools to do so much more. We build to scale with an emphasis on beauty and positive neighborhood impact. We take those limited public dollars and match them with sweat equity, volunteerism, and donated funds. Further, the fees we earn from developing homes aren't siphoned off into private bank accounts—they're invested back into our social missions and often used to keep housing permanently affordable.
Our projects regularly juggle five to ten funding sources, each with their own compliance burdens. That's not because we're inefficient—it's because we're accountable. When a developer gets access to public dollars, whether through grants, LIHTC, or Brownfield TIF, there must be a means for ensuring they do what they say they will do. The outcome matters, and that requires some inherent inefficiency.
We are developing new housing where it's hardest to build. We are serving residents with the highest barriers to stability and creating ownership models that counteract decades of injustice. We do all that while staying rooted in the same neighborhoods where redlining once flourished and where displacement pressure has become a threat to legacy residents.
A False Trichotomy: Nonprofit Heroes, Big Developers, and the Small Army
Your readers might falsely conclude that nonprofit housing heroes do charity, unrestricted big developers are all altruistic capitalists, and small developers with friendly capital always become inclusive landlords. That assessment inaccurately stereotypes all these groups. Worse yet, it unfairly paints nonprofit leaders as thoughtless bleeding-heart do-gooders who bury their expertise and want to manage housing crises in perpetuity.
I'd encourage us to move beyond narratives that unfairly characterize nonprofit leaders. We're experienced advocates working toward reform while maintaining community accountability.
The housing crisis requires collaboration, and I believe we can better recognize the contributions of those who've been steadily working toward equitable solutions.
Ryan, this is a brilliant response / rebuttal. Thank you!
And, I never intended to pit nonprofits against mom and pop builders or large scale developers. 80% of my clients ARE nonprofits. The point I intended to make was that we can’t rely solely on nonprofits to solve all of our housing challenges.
We can’t continue exclusionary practices in all but a handful of places and expect nonprofits to make up for it with donations and sweat. So many of our current issues could be more easily resolved with better policy and practices which would expand your organizations’ ability to serve more families.
ICCF is unique in its ability to do many things - including advocacy for better policies at a local level. And my guess is that as incredible as your team is, they can’t take the time to advocate for policy changes in all 35 local jurisdictions in Kent County, or all 25 jurisdictions in Ottawa County, or all 2,800 across the state of Michigan. It’s too big to tackle one conversation at a time unless you’re comfortable with policy moving on geologic time scales.
I don’t think you and I are far apart at all. Maybe I just need to be more careful with my words/phrasing.
I’m glad you’re breaking this down into several posts - and talking about what it actually takes to get housing built on the ground. One of the things that has been driving me crazy about the Abundance debate is that people not involved with development or city planning are making glib statements about changing zoning…with little understanding of the challenges of doing that.
I do think that the population that is lowest income and most in need will not truly be served by a supply side approach. Large developers will not build if they don’t see a profit, and small developers, especially those just starting out, have a low tolerance for risk. Non profit developers have a place building at scale to serve the needs of the very low income, and that need is large and will not change until structural changes in society do - the education system, the criminal justice system, the orientation towards a service economy. Small scale developers can absolutely stitch a neighborhood back together and rebuild the social fabric we all are seeking. But, as the commenter before me states, all levels of development are needed.
I look forward to the rest of the posts in this series. It’s good to see more people on this platform translate the heady ideas of abundance into the real world.
Thanks, Emily. I really appreciate you reading these and would love to continue to hear your thoughts and critique along the way. I’m using this platform as a means to learn collaboratively with a lot of people and have been pleasantly surprised by how good the dialogue can be here.
I need to push back on the narrative about nonprofit housing heroes. In your effort to champion systems reform, you draw a line that doesn't need to exist—suggesting that nonprofit housing workers are exhausted and stuck in triage mode. You say we're too tired and busy with our charitable helping professions to tackle root causes.
That's not the full story. The nonprofit housing leaders I know are not just helping one person at a time or building and preserving affordable housing one house at a time. We are—and have been—reshaping how housing gets done from the grassroots to the system level through advocacy, principled action, and innovation. We're not sidelined by symptom management.
Nonprofit Housing Leaders Are Trusted Advocates for System Change
Because nonprofits are "community-owned," we must consistently refine and renegotiate our respective cases for support with a diverse set of stakeholders. While that can be exhausting, it also serves as a means of educating the broader civil society and policymakers about housing needs and barriers to development in our communities. Public awareness and feedback is where good policy change begins.
In Grand Rapids, for example, nonprofit developers were first to respond to concerns from grassroots neighborhood leaders. We began advocating for zoning reforms in 2018, ahead of the city's Housing NOW! legislation and years before other groups like the Chamber got involved in zoning reform work.
Nonprofit Housing Leaders Build for Marginalized People, Not Financial Margins
Your post argues that the answer is abundance—I agree, but who gets to it first? Less-regulated supply doesn't automatically lead to fairness in housing. You named it in your article: big developers depend on scarcity for high returns.
Even if our communities solve the problems created by zoning constraints, inflated material and labor costs, high interest rates, and investors' demands for good ROI force big developers to build housing for the "high-end" of the market first. They assume that the benefits of added supply will trickle down to those with fewer means, passively addressing the needs of those with the most of them.
Nonprofit leaders don't build for speculation first or prioritize investor ROI. We build with a passion for sustainability and stewardship. We intentionally leverage as many resources as possible to build for those in the most need first. We need intentional, inclusive housing development—grounded in community voice and aimed at uplifting those most at risk of being pushed out.
Successful big developers, and even the small army of small-scale builders, are averse to the risk that "risky tenants" might represent to their bottom line.
Nonprofit Housing Leaders Do More With Less and Create New Approaches
Nonprofit leaders aren't just building one house at a time with existing public tools like LIHTC and HUD programs. We leverage those tools to do so much more. We build to scale with an emphasis on beauty and positive neighborhood impact. We take those limited public dollars and match them with sweat equity, volunteerism, and donated funds. Further, the fees we earn from developing homes aren't siphoned off into private bank accounts—they're invested back into our social missions and often used to keep housing permanently affordable.
Our projects regularly juggle five to ten funding sources, each with their own compliance burdens. That's not because we're inefficient—it's because we're accountable. When a developer gets access to public dollars, whether through grants, LIHTC, or Brownfield TIF, there must be a means for ensuring they do what they say they will do. The outcome matters, and that requires some inherent inefficiency.
We are developing new housing where it's hardest to build. We are serving residents with the highest barriers to stability and creating ownership models that counteract decades of injustice. We do all that while staying rooted in the same neighborhoods where redlining once flourished and where displacement pressure has become a threat to legacy residents.
A False Trichotomy: Nonprofit Heroes, Big Developers, and the Small Army
Your readers might falsely conclude that nonprofit housing heroes do charity, unrestricted big developers are all altruistic capitalists, and small developers with friendly capital always become inclusive landlords. That assessment inaccurately stereotypes all these groups. Worse yet, it unfairly paints nonprofit leaders as thoughtless bleeding-heart do-gooders who bury their expertise and want to manage housing crises in perpetuity.
I'd encourage us to move beyond narratives that unfairly characterize nonprofit leaders. We're experienced advocates working toward reform while maintaining community accountability.
The housing crisis requires collaboration, and I believe we can better recognize the contributions of those who've been steadily working toward equitable solutions.
Ryan, this is a brilliant response / rebuttal. Thank you!
And, I never intended to pit nonprofits against mom and pop builders or large scale developers. 80% of my clients ARE nonprofits. The point I intended to make was that we can’t rely solely on nonprofits to solve all of our housing challenges.
We can’t continue exclusionary practices in all but a handful of places and expect nonprofits to make up for it with donations and sweat. So many of our current issues could be more easily resolved with better policy and practices which would expand your organizations’ ability to serve more families.
ICCF is unique in its ability to do many things - including advocacy for better policies at a local level. And my guess is that as incredible as your team is, they can’t take the time to advocate for policy changes in all 35 local jurisdictions in Kent County, or all 25 jurisdictions in Ottawa County, or all 2,800 across the state of Michigan. It’s too big to tackle one conversation at a time unless you’re comfortable with policy moving on geologic time scales.
I don’t think you and I are far apart at all. Maybe I just need to be more careful with my words/phrasing.
I’m glad you’re breaking this down into several posts - and talking about what it actually takes to get housing built on the ground. One of the things that has been driving me crazy about the Abundance debate is that people not involved with development or city planning are making glib statements about changing zoning…with little understanding of the challenges of doing that.
I do think that the population that is lowest income and most in need will not truly be served by a supply side approach. Large developers will not build if they don’t see a profit, and small developers, especially those just starting out, have a low tolerance for risk. Non profit developers have a place building at scale to serve the needs of the very low income, and that need is large and will not change until structural changes in society do - the education system, the criminal justice system, the orientation towards a service economy. Small scale developers can absolutely stitch a neighborhood back together and rebuild the social fabric we all are seeking. But, as the commenter before me states, all levels of development are needed.
I look forward to the rest of the posts in this series. It’s good to see more people on this platform translate the heady ideas of abundance into the real world.
Thanks, Emily. I really appreciate you reading these and would love to continue to hear your thoughts and critique along the way. I’m using this platform as a means to learn collaboratively with a lot of people and have been pleasantly surprised by how good the dialogue can be here.
Really nice roundup of this misunderstood topic!