NH&RA 2013 Vision Award Honoree, Vincent P. O’Donnell: Housing as Social Justice

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One day in his home in a blue collar all-white neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia in the mid-1950s, the pre-teen Vincent F. O’Donnell, Jr. heard his older sister Patricia say to their dad, a hard working sometime bread man, sometime milkman, sometime handyman, sometime sheet metal worker, full-time family supporter, “How can you go to church on Sundays and still say the things you do about negroes?”

The remark lingered in younger Vince’s mind and stuck in his craw. Just a few years later in his teens, as the Civil Rights movement gained steam, Vince, a talented musician, shifted his enthusiasm from classical violin to jazz guitar and thus found himself drifting from the all-white environment of his upbringing to a diverse racial world of musicians. “Civil Rights started to grab me,” O’Donnell says. “My simple assumptions were challenged. What was once just a concern affecting others suddenly became part of my world.”

Vince attended the University of Pennsylvania where he was “deeply impressed with my teachers’ non-dogmatic approach to fairness.” While in graduate school at Harvard, he tried to make a social contribution by tutoring in Boston’s South End, only to be left feeling the problems were huger than his effort. When working on his thesis, he felt as if he wasn’t doing enough about the social tumult he was living through.

This urge to contribute began a circuitous journey towards personal fulfillment for Vince O’Donnell that eventually landed him at the Community Economic Development Assistance Corporation in Boston and then on to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, where as Vice President of Preservation his specialty was leading efforts to save at-risk assisted multifamily housing via the formation of creative partnerships. During his tenure, which ended last July, LISC invested more than $100 million to preserve more than 20,000 units.

Now at 72 and affiliated with Preservation of Affordable Housing, Inc. (POAH), Vince O’Donnell, who devoted his career to pursuing social justice through housing, will be honored along with Jack Manning on November 13 by the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association with its 2013 Vision Award for career achievement in affordable housing. The gala evening ceremony at Boston’s Langham Hotel will coincide with NH&RA’s 2013 Fall Developers Forum.

Vincent O’Donnell’s History

Living in Roxbury while attending Harvard, O’Donnell found his head spinning observing the formation of Mothers for Adequate Welfare Services, free schools, and the work of community organizer Lew Finfer. “The organizer’s organizer,” says O’Donnell. “I realized some people do this work for the right reasons. I wanted to get involved in decisions that affect a whole community.”

So O’Donnell took a break from his thesis, volunteered to do code enforcement work and was then offered a job working for Mayor Kevin White analyzing the inadequacy of the city’s Housing Inspection Department. It turned out to be a heady time. Barney Frank was White’s Chief of Staff. Fred Salvucci, later a Dukakis transportation secretary, was in the office. And then O’Donnell was put onto a three-year study of the subsidized housing inventory in Boston. “In my study, I saw that the Boston assisted housing inventory was in real trouble,” he says. “And I saw a looming need for rental assistance to ward off foreclosure and physical decline. I also learned that you can do rehabilitation in a cost effective way despite the FHA bureaucracy.”

Along with Emily Achtenberg, O’Donnell put together a demonstration program at Citizen’s Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA) with a mission to redevelop Boston’s foreclosed subsidized housing properties. “We had a willing HUD office and the right legislative tools and I got a good grasp on how to make bureaucracy respond to the problem. Our focus was on keeping housing affordable instead of selling it off.”

The demonstration was inspired by the residents of Methunion Manor, a non-profit subsidized housing development in Boston’s South End that went into foreclosure. HUD’s posture was that it should be sold to a market-rate developer. The tenants went to Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke and persuaded him that HUD needed a legal mandate to keep the housing affordable. That legislation was a landmark preservation victory. Eventually, the tenants purchased their property as a limited equity coop. O’Donnell remains proud of the opportunity to work with and learn from this and other successful tenant organizations.

His Career Progresses

Later, O’Donnell was hired by CEDAC, a quasi-public community development finance institution that provides technical assistance, pre-development lending, and consulting services to non-profit organizations involved in housing development, workforce development, neighborhood economic development, and capital improvements to child care facilities. His role was very broadly defined: to provide technical support to nonprofit CDC borrowers; to underwrite loans and present credit proposals to the board; and to work with the Executive Director, Carl Sussman, on policy issues affecting CEDAC’s mission. That included developing CEDAC’s leadership in highlighting the preservation issue and in developing solutions for state and local government, residents, and owners.

Castle Square was a 500-unit affordable property built in the mid-60s. In the late ‘80’s, the owner decided to sell, and the tenants, worried about their future, turned to CEDAC and others for advice. However, the community was plagued by inter-ethnic tension, and a prominent elected official advised the Castle Square Tenant Organization (CSTO) to pitch in and help with this problem, to establish credibility. That’s what they did, and then CEDAC worked with CSTO’s team to persuade the buyer to go into partnership with the residents and give them the option to purchase when the tax credits ran out.

“I was learning that there were all kinds of solutions to preserving affordable housing,” O’Donnell says. “Private/public partnerships, for profits with tenant groups, not-for-profits with tenant groups, for profits and not-for-profits. Whatever it took. There were a lot of partnerships with tenant groups that did not succeed. But when they did, housing became a platform for family stability. We also spent a lot of time encouraging developers to encourage each other to keep housing affordable, which was the start of a strong tradition in Boston.”

O’Donnell’s work at CEDAC led directly to his hiring at LISC to fill a new position intended to create a coherent strategy for affordable housing preservation that included: transaction-based technical assistance, including loan underwriting support; inventory analysis using a database developed to integrate various public sources; support for local stakeholder education and coalition-building, including state and local government partners; training (for both internal staff and external partners) around emerging tools and issues; and policy advocacy. Over time the initially solo position became a small team that broadened LISC’s preservation activities to include general support for a variety of multifamily finance issues, including LIHTC, use of ARRA resources, and integrating preservation with a Green agenda.

Recent, Current Activities

O’Donnell’s career is intertwined with CHAPA – it was an early waterhole for his learning the ropes, and after the demonstration program he joined the board. Recently, he actively supported CHAPA’s leadership in developing a consensus for passage of the state’s new affordable housing preservation law, Chapter 40T, whose origins date back to his early days at CEDAC.

Now, although O’Donnell’s winding it down, he’s serving for a year at Preservation of Affordable Housing LLC (POAH) during Manager of Acquisitions Bart Lloyd’s sabbatical, sharing his experience in forming creative partnerships to sustain low-income residences.

He devotes his down time to his family – his wife, Marcia Goldensher, a family physician in Watertown, two sons, a daughter and six grandchildren, as well as to the skill that first opened his eyes to bigger world and inspired him – music. O’Donnell has returned to his fiddle, but is playing a whole different tune: Along with his wife, O’Donnell spent this past Labor Day weekend at a camp in Plymouth where he provided the music for New England-style contra dancing and English and Scottish country dance.