Winners of Nationwide Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge Named
September 22 2020 - 10:05AM
Business Wire
Six housing innovators receive a total of $12 million in grants
to create housing affordability solutions across the U.S.
Although the housing challenges facing millions of Americans
often seem intractable, organizations from across the U.S. are
collaborating to deliver fresh, innovative and scalable ideas to
create housing affordability solutions with support from Enterprise
Community Partners and Wells Fargo.
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Through the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge, a
nationwide competition that began in January 2020, six winning
organizations will each receive $2 million in grants and two years
of technical assistance valued at $500,000 to bring innovative
concepts to market. Winning breakthrough ideas include building
more equitable, healthier and resilient homes that radically reduce
carbon emissions, re-engineering the affordable housing delivery
system, and rethinking community reentry by building dignity
through a home.
“Housing affordability is directly tied to racial equity, and
both are urgent issues fundamentally impacting every community in
our country. That is what makes the Breakthrough Challenge so
important right now,” said Priscilla Almodovar, chief executive
officer at Enterprise Community Partners. “We’re thrilled to
support our grantees and the next generation of housing solutions
through these six visionary proposals. Enterprise is incredibly
grateful for the generous financial resources and tremendous
expertise brought by the Wells Fargo team throughout the
competition.”
With three focus areas — housing construction, housing finance,
and resident services and support — the competition drew close to
900 applications from 49 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
After two application rounds, 15 finalists were invited to offer a
detailed application proposal and present a 10-minute virtual pitch
to an independent panel of judges composed of leading national
affordable housing and community development experts. Two winners
were chosen from each focus area.
“Too often good ideas are overlooked because they need expertise
and resources to bring them to scale,” said Nate Hurst, president
of the Wells Fargo Foundation. “We are delighted to join Enterprise
Community Partners to engage creative innovators with know-how,
technical skill, and imagination, who are now awarded catalytic
funding to transform their housing affordability ideas into real
solutions on the ground.”
The Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge is part of
Wells Fargo’s $1 billion commitment to support housing
affordability solutions nationwide by 2025.
The six organizations that will receive $2.5 million awards each
and their breakthrough ideas are:
Housing Construction
- cdcb | come dream. come build. (Texas): MiCASiTA is a
unique off-the-shelf environmentally sustainable,
disaster-resilient modular homeownership innovation designed for
rural families across South Texas and more communities struggling
with persistent poverty throughout the United States. Reimagining
affordable housing delivery, MiCASiTA marks a departure from a
one-size-fits-all model to a system that empowers people of color
with modest incomes to choose and design their own homes to advance
wealth-building, protect the environment and strengthen vulnerable
neighborhoods.
- Forterra NW (Washington): Prototyping Modular
Cross-Laminated Timber to Re-engineer the Affordable Housing Supply
Chain brings together tribes, communities of color, forest
conservationists, architects and more to replace conventional
construction technologies that rely on stick framing, concrete and
steel with a modular cross-laminated timber prototype. Propelled by
community engagement, the new building system promotes responsibly
harvested forests, promising to radically lower the cost of
construction, create needed rural jobs, and mitigate the dangers of
climate change.
Housing Finance
- Center for NYC Neighborhoods (New York): Underwriting
for Good aims to rewrite who gets to be a homeowner in the U.S. by
dramatically increasing the amount of credit flowing to families of
color with modest means. Harnessing the power of financial
technology (fintech), the tool will affirmatively address racial
inequity and reduce the racial wealth gap through at-scale,
nondiscriminatory lending and the creation of a new automated
underwriting system with the potential to secure an equitable
recovery from COVID-19. When brought to scale, the tool will enable
access to credit for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
borrowers of color who will gain the opportunity to build wealth
through homeownership.
- Gulf Coast Housing Partnership (Alabama, Louisiana,
Mississippi): Health + Housing seeks to create groundbreaking value
propositions for residents as well as health care payors by
demonstrating the benefits of investing in affordable housing at
scale. The model aims to promote agency and equity among residents
in a region where communities of color have faced historic barriers
to health care, by anchoring communities with access to healthy,
affordable homes linked with culturally competent preventative
health care services.
Resident Services and Support
- Impact Justice (California): The Homecoming Project
revolutionizes reentry housing by pairing individuals returning
from prison with people who have a room available in their home to
live as part of a family and neighborhood, while receiving
individualized support and services to help regain their dignity
and rebuild their new lives. Inspired by Airbnb and the sharing
economy, the program aims to reduce homelessness among formerly
incarcerated people, increase the quality and availability of
affordable housing, and strengthen the financial stability of
homeowners at risk of being forced out of their neighborhoods by
gentrification and other economic forces.
- Preservation of Affordable Housing (Ohio, Massachusetts,
Missouri): Designing Trauma-Resilient Communities reimagines
affordable housing through the lens of trauma-informed care and its
core principles: safety, trust, choice, collaboration and
empowerment. The innovation aims to move the industry from a
compliance mindset to a resilient-communities approach, centered on
the premise that affordable housing exists to serve residents. It
envisions a more equitable model for affordable housing that
reduces evictions; improves resident and staff retention; promotes
health through physical design; and leads to helping residents gain
the resiliency to pursue and realize their hopes and goals.
For more information on the competition, as well as the
finalists and their winning proposals, visit the Housing
Affordability Breakthrough Challenge website.
About Enterprise
Enterprise is a proven and powerful nonprofit that
improves communities and people’s lives by making well-designed
homes affordable and connected to opportunity. As a social
enterprise, we bring together the nationwide know-how, policy
leadership, partners, donors and investors to multiply the impact
of local affordable housing development. Over more than 35 years,
Enterprise has created 662,000 homes, invested more than $52.9
billion and touched millions of lives. Join us at
www.enterprisecommunity.org. | Twitter: @EnterpriseNow.
About Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) is a diversified,
community-based financial services company with $1.97 trillion in
assets. Wells Fargo’s vision is to satisfy our customers’ financial
needs and help them succeed financially. Founded in 1852 and
headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking,
investment and mortgage products and services, as well as consumer
and commercial finance, through 7,300 locations, more than 13,000
ATMs, the internet (wellsfargo.com) and mobile banking, and has
offices in 31 countries and territories to support customers who
conduct business in the global economy. With approximately 266,000
team members, Wells Fargo serves one in three households in the
United States. Wells Fargo & Company was ranked No. 30 on
Fortune’s 2020 rankings of America’s largest corporations. News,
insights and more information on the company’s overall corporate
responsibility are available at Wells Fargo Stories and
www.wellsfargo.com/impact. Additional information may be found at
www.wellsfargo.com | Twitter: @WellsFargo.
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Chris Hammond Wells Fargo 415-310-9152
chris.l.hammond@wellsfargo.com
Jordan Miller Group Gordon on behalf of Enterprise Community
Partners 212-784-5703 jmiller@groupgordon.com
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