NH&RA 2009 Affordable Housing Vision Award Recipients
By Caitlin Jones
4 min read
Tax Credit Advisor, November 2009:
Lisa Alberghini:
Housing’s Just the Starting Point
By Marty Bell
For Lisa Alberghini, the inspiration has always been family. The house where she grew up in the working class town of Burlington, Mass., 15 miles north of Boston, along with six brothers and sisters, is still the home to five generations of her family, beginning with her 103-year-old grandmother. At various times, Lisa and her husband, developer Peter Roche, and their daughter have lived with the clan.
The need of family members to take care of each other led her naturally to housing during her graduate studies at Tufts University. “I always viewed housing as the organizing point,” she says. “I like to think of our work in a broader context, addressing a broader user need. I happened to focus on the starting point, housing, but I’m interested in the fundamental aspects that make up a life. Good, comfortable, affordable housing affects the ability to get a job, which lets you have a family, which lets you get them an education and so on. It’s helping people that concerns me.”
Lisa, a recipient of the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association’s 2009 Affordable Housing Vision Award, has developed affordable housing units for more than 2,000 families, working exclusively in the nonprofit sector at the Boston Office of The Community Builders, Inc. and, for the past eight years, as the president of Planning Office for Urban Affairs, the housing arm of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.
Over the past few years she has tackled the uphill battle of building communities shared by different income levels, such as Rollins Square in Boston’s South End, where 37 low-income families, some previously homeless, live along with 74 largely first-time home buyers who paid over $1 million for a unit.
“The key has been creating a community environment from the start,” she says. “This works better in some areas than others. In the South End, there is a history of economic diversity. Our approach was to build a very high-quality product on a very human scale – gorgeous design, walls that blocked out all the noise, only four doors in the hallway to every apartment.”
“You can only do this if you have the right team – an architect who gets it, a contractor who builds to budget, a development consultant who understands what we’re looking for, and a financial partner who is committed to the overall concept and not just the bottom line.”
Bank of America was that partner for Rollins Square, providing a $52 million construction loan and some of the equity for the $69 million project that also included other private equity and subsidies from the city and the Commonwealth. To avoid further subsidy, the Planning Office creatively plowed its development fee back into the deal and put 45 high-end units into escrow as additional collateral for the bank. In the event the units could not sell, the development corporation would give up some of these units to the bank. The city of Boston initially fought Lisa on this income escrow approach. But after the success at Rollins Square, the city now uses this approach routinely.
“I had one white market-rate condo buyer there who realized he was living next door to a four-bedroom tax credit rental unit with an African-American family with five kids and was really concerned,” Lisa says. “The condo owner was divorced and had his kids on weekends and they soon became best friends with the renters next door. When we would take people on a tour of Rollins Square, we would stop at the condo and the owner would always tell this story, concluding with, “˜Now I never want them to move.’”
Lisa is now focused on opening up affordable housing in the suburbs, creating living spaces in wealthier areas like Brookline, to permit teachers, librarians, and firefighters to live in the communities where they work. St. Aidan’s, the Brookline project, is comprised of 59 units that will become home for everyone from the homeless to $2 million first-time home buyers.
Lisa, who serves on the boards of the Housing Partnership Network and the Catholic Charities of Boston, believes that the future will see more focus on affordable rental housing. “The push into ownership caused us a lot of problems,” she says. “Now the focus has been forced back to where it should be.”
“Housing,” she says, “is a social justice tool. If you have the right access to services, jobs, education, and transportation, you have the time and the energy to focus on other things.”
