San Luis Obispo County Housing Trust Fund

Assist in creating or preserving at least 50 affordable homes per year.

We provide flexible short-term financing to assist local housing projects. We fill a niche between private lenders and government housing program. We typically partner banks and/or government funders to help make projects work. We recently designed a loan product that will help local projects be more competitive for low income housing tax credits.

We also provide technical assistance to housing sponsors in areas such as real estate, financing, government subsidies, grant writing, organization development and zoning and planning.

One of our most important resources for achieving our goals is that we have raised $10 million in revolving loan funds. Our loan funds includes nearly $4 million in equity - grants and donations. We also have more than $3.7 million in investments and commitments from local. These funds are dedicated to financing affordable housing projects.

Our executive director has more than 35 years of experience in the affordable housing and community development field. He managed housing programs for state and local governments and a nonprofit intermediary that served the Western US. He also consulted for a number of years and has been our director since 2003. He earned a masters in urban and regional planning and was a licensed real estate broker and agent for more than 20 years. He has taught courses in both real estate and urban planning.

Our board has consistently broad experience in areas that are related to our mission and goals. It currently includes the CEO of a credit union, the former manager of a bank's commercial lending division, an architect, a developer and the executive director of a nonprofit that owns emergency shelters and transitional housing.

We have also developed partnerships with every local government in the county and most of the banks.

Since our county is one of the least affordable housing markets in the nation for both renters and home buyers, we make no pretense of ever being able to change this fact. We simply strive to make more housing affordable for a greater number of people.

As noted earlier, we have assisted 332 affordable units to date. Over 40% of the units we assisted are for household that earn less than half of the county median income and almost 20% are for households with special needs. While our activity fluctuates from year to year, the overall trend is that we are assisting more units as time goes by. We hope to maintain this trend into the future.

Despite the recent housing crash, we have never lost one penny on our loans. A few projects that we financed were delayed, but all are moving forward. Being a prudent lender was critical as our assets grew. We will always be a prudent lender, but now that our balance sheet is fairly strong, the board has agreed to consider financing a few projects that are riskier, but important.