Marty Bell Author Archives

A few issues back, our esteemed affordable housing advocate and columnist, David Abromowitz, vented in these pages about the lack of attention for our industry among political candidates.
“Yet if history is a guide,” he wrote, “almost none of them will have much, if anything, to say about one of the biggest costs in every family’s budget: housing.”
Well, the candidates on the primary trail may not be focused on us, but a lot of other folks in their destination of choice—our nation’s capital—seem to be.

If you attended NH&RA’s Spring Forum in Los Angeles in May or just took a glance at the event’s agenda, you will recognize many of the topics covered in this month’s issue. A paramount objective of both a trade association and a trade magazine is to capture the current mindset of an industry, address the issues of greatest concern and facilitate the sharing of experience and innovative thinking across company lines. I view the association and the magazine as partners in comprehensive communication.

Along with a little luck, choice is probably the primary determinant of success. It’s also the basis of endless debate. Did our child pick the right spouse? Did our team pick the right draft choice? Why’d you order that dish? You’re voting for who? Yellow? You’re painting this room yellow? You know you look great in that dress.
Just think how much of our daily discussion is triggered by the choices we (or others) make.

In an anecdote that has become urban folklore, the famous Roaring 20s pilferer Willie Sutton was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” And he responded, “It’s where the money is.”

Early in the 1980s, when I was earning my keep as a freelance journalist, my brother Peter asked if I would write a newsletter for a fairly new organization he was managing called the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association. The assignment came with a great perk—attending the organization’s conference on Martha’s Vineyard. It was there that I first had the privilege of observing the creativity in strategic financial thinking that (IMHO) has characterized NH&RA throughout its history.

To a group of American housing developers and financiers, four days in Havana is a tall mojito loaded with both spices and bitters. Make that a pitcher of mojitos, for walking the streets of a city frozen in the ‘50s surrounded by turquoise and lavender cars with protruding fins that your grandfather used to drive, you cannot help but feel a bit inebriated.

We take energy for granted. We know it’s there, someplace. Water is running, lights are on, food is cooking, and something somewhere is making it happen. But we can’t see it, like a new couch or a new car, we can’t flop onto it, jump into it, speed it up. It’s one thing to try to sell people something tactile and visible, it’s another to sell them an idea for something that is invisible and seems intangible.

On the first Monday in February each year, the day on which what is generally referred to as “the President’s Budget” is released, Washington is sated with that giddiness you feel on the night of a Nats’ playoff game or an all-star holiday concert on the Mall. After all, the federal government is the biggest bank in America and there are a whole lot of folks eager to dip into its coffers.

Call it an exodus, call it a coincidence or call it a meme, but Americans are heading to the cities in the largest numbers since the Industrial Revolution changed a rural society into an urban society at the end of the 19th century. This latest great migration is from the center of the country towards all the edges. And it’s not surprising since the cities are beautiful. A month ago, I traveled from my home in beautiful Washington to Boston, Pittsburgh, Charleston and Atlanta and each of them was beautiful in its own quirky way.

Providing housing and its resultant community benefits not just as an occupation, but as the means to sustaining the American dream, was the theme that ran throughout the emotional ceremony honoring Andrea Daskalakis and David Abromowitz as winners of NH&RA’s 2014 Affordable Housing Vision Awards for Career Achievement.

There is nothing stale or shy about a National Housing & Rehabilitation Association conference.

Like all major metropolises in the Northeast and Midwest, Boston is a city with a complexity of identities – a city of long history with lingering remnants of colonialism, a city of great ethnic diversity that provides it a strong sense of family and has also at times provoked racial conflict, a city of almost unmatched intellectualism.