Online Event Archive Recorded: November 6, 2025
In September, NCRC convened more than 160 community leaders, financial institutions, and policy experts in Nashville for a bold new kind of summit, one focused not on more panels, but on structured, action-oriented dialogue. We heard from national thought leaders about the “new normal” facing communities: shrinking federal support, widening disparities, and a growing sense of isolation among local changemakers. We listened, reflected, and rolled up our sleeves to start imagining what new systems we need to build—in housing, small business and workforce—to ensure inclusive, sustainable futures. Now, the work continues.
Speakers:
Transcript:
NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.
Matthews 0:07
Hi. My name is Jacelyn Matthews and I’m the director of the National Training Academy here at NCRC, and I wanted to officially welcome you to our debrief of the Just Economy Summit that we had in Nashville two months ago. So from problems to prototypes. Move on to the next slide. I’m going to just give a little bit more information about NCRC if you do not know who we are and what we do. So NCRC network includes more than 700 organizations nationwide, all working together to advance a just economy. So its as simple as a just economy is one where everyone has a fair chance to thrive and where capital and opportunity flow into communities to expand housing, grow small businesses and create quality jobs. So it’s about economic justice, which is making sure people can build wealth instability with dignity, no matter where they live. So we do this in partnership with community leaders, policymakers and institutions that share our belief that an economy should work for everyone, not just a few. So before we actually move into the actual meat of our conversation this afternoon, I just want to make mention of housekeeping slash our Code of Conduct when we are doing webinars or any convening, we want to make sure people are and we’ll actually reference this in the chat as well, so you can actually see our Code of Conduct. Just want to make sure that we are honoring each other, being mindful of how we speak to each other, being respectful in our language as well being welcoming and always assuming positive and good intent in our interactions. So move on to the next slide.
Okay, so what does this mean for you today? Why are we here?
What’s this conversation about? So we’ve structured today’s webinar to mirror the journey participants actually went through at our summit, right? So we’ll start by understanding the shift from our traditional summit model. So if you’ve gone to our summits in the past, you might be wondering and questioning why we pivoted to this new approach. So we’ll go, we’ll double a bit deeper about the why behind that, and moving to a more dialog approach in that shaped our time in Nashville. So next, after that, we’ll set the stage and define the problems beyond just the federal funding cuts, which was the entry point to why we decided to make this pivot. But we wanted to make sure that we are talking about the things that are being faced by the movement for just economy in this moment, we want to make sure that we were being responsive and reflective of what’s happening, instead of going with the status quo. And then we’ll spotlight the most exciting innovations and opportunities that came from the summit these actual conversations we were having with each other. And finally, we’ll end with concrete next steps that you can take to bring these ideas to life in and beyond your own work. Our goal is not just to report out on what happened, but to equip you to be part of the solution.
So just to kind of give a little bit of background about how it was built, like the slide says, we were trying to have a new kind of conversation, moving from our traditional model to a more collaborative model. It’s a leaning in or calling in versus the calling out and making sure that we’re having the right people present in the room to have these really great conversations. So in September, during our summit, we brought together dozens of the best and brightest practitioners in affordable housing, Small Business and workforce development. But we knew that to solve the complex challenges that our communities face, we couldn’t just host another typical conference, so this moment required more of us. So this may not be a unique moment in our history, but it’s a fort, but fortunately, it’s a rare one. When the foundation that our community development and economic justice movements are built on shift from under our feet. These moments of great change are a time of fear and concern, but also one of opportunity, when it is possible to change the structures and assumptions that we work with them.
So this process happened in the 80s and the 90s, and broke the system framed by Lynch, new market, tax credits, workforce, Innovation Act later, WIOA and the CDF, CDFI Fund, just to name a few pillars, and today, many of those have been zeroed out or drastically reduced. And we understand that. We’ve heard from our members about how they’re being impacted. We’ve seen what’s happening to others in the impact. So it’s reduced their pathways of driving investment effectively, and even if funding returns for their purposes, it will look different than it did before. So the truth that we recognize when we said about redesigning the summit is that we can’t just go back to how things were, because, frankly, even that system wasn’t working for many in our communities. And I’m sure you all can agree with that, right? Like that’s not something that we’re just saying. I’m sure that’s something that you’ve noticed as well. So in the last cycle of major change, philanthropy and think tanks used their convening power to drive conversations what would be needed for a system where the federal government would serve to build markets rather than directly support the working communities. So this moment requires a different set of conversations focused on how to make a better system that works for those doing the actual things needed to meet the outcomes and community, which meant we knew that practitioners voices needed to be at the center, and our job was to create a safe place to have these conversations and this place to listen and amplify what we heard. So this summit was designed to do just that.
So you’re probably asking, how do we actually do that? Right? How did we get to the powerful takeaways we’ll be sharing today? Our summit was structured around a deliberate one and a half day format focused on moving from problems to solutions. At each stage, we came together to hear from a panel of leaders at the national and municipal levels, having their conversation served to both ground and jumpstart conversations as we broke into 18 separate tables for facilitated dialogs with our peers. Each table is filled with practitioners from the same field or area of focus priority, with a mix of geographies and organization sizes, including nonprofit executives. Program leaders represent representatives of financial institutions and even a few municipal officials. NCRC staff served as recorders of these dialogs, taking animized notes of over 80 hours of concurrent conversations we had throughout the day and a half. Those notes provided the material that will be going over today, condensed due to the time we have together. There’s a lot that came out of these conversations, but we want to make sure we highlight those things that we heard over and over again from multiple people across many of the tables that we had brought together. And we’ll be publishing a more complete form as an in-depth publication early next year. So you’ll be able to actually see it, you know, actually like, be able to play around with it, read it, dig deeper, ask questions.
So first, we want to say that we dedicated time to unpack the barriers. Right? Instead of starting with solutions, we started with honesty. We asked leaders from each sector to put the real on the ground problems on the table. You’ll see these reflected as the shared challenges and a couple of slides. Second, we shifted to innovate new models. So this is where the energy really sparked. We challenged our participants to think beyond the usual constraints and brainstorm with each other new ways of working. The goal wasn’t small tweaks, but the transformative ideas that could fundamentally change the system. And finally, we worked to prioritize actionable solutions. So an idea is only as good as our ability to implement it. In our final sessions, we filtered these innovations, identifying those with the highest potential for impact, and this prioritization didn’t just end when we left Nashville. That’s the same lens that we use when reviewing all of the hundreds of solutions raised in those rooms, some of them were hyperly specific, either to geography or barrier, and so would be less applicable across our diverse membership. Some were models that are already being broadly adopted and have national support. Others weren’t actionable or attainable, but instead were voice aspirations for a different economic system. While all the solutions deserve to be heard, and the hour we have together today, we’re going to focus on not just interesting ideas, but the most promising strategies that emerge from this intensive process. The full complement of barriers and solutions will be included in the publication that I mentioned earlier. And so with that, I’ll turn it over to Devin to really dive deeper into some of the findings.
Thompson 9:07
Thanks, Jacelyn. So hi folks. I’m Devin Thompson. I am director of health equity and impact here at NCRC, and for those who attended the summit, probably saw me running around, taking notes and helping out across the board. So we’re going to get into some of the barriers, as Jacelyn mentioned, and there we go. So with that process in mind, let’s dive into just what we found together. So we brought together leaders, predominantly in affordable housing, small business supports and workforce development. And while you might expect their problems to be unique and they were, we discovered something powerful, that a lot of these biggest barriers have common roots, and some are nearly identical across sector. So some of the things that you’re going to hear things you probably said yourself, and that’s good, others might be more difficult to hear, because we all have things that we take as the foundation of our work, but we’ve synthesized the set of barriers into three core challenges that cut across all three core groups. So firstly, and I’ve heard this my entire time in community development, and we heard it at nearly every table, regardless of its area of focus, was that of silos. You know, whether it was siloed funding streams and housing that don’t talk to each other, duplicated business support services from organizations commuting for the same clients or the same loans or a lack of holistic support for workers that have needs that cross all parts of the comprehensive community development framework. We heard loud and clear, our systems are too fragmented to be effective. This structure forces people to navigate a maze of services and prevents us from leveraging our collective resources in any given community to create the transformation that that community needs and asks for. So it leads us as organizational leaders to choose to unfortunately have to compete with each other seeing resources as finite and zero sum, where attention to housing must, for some inexplicable, frequently political reason, come at the expense of resourcing for child care or career path programs, but oddly never for from the for profit developers of luxury buildings who are working in those same communities. And while we acknowledged in that room that we are a shared movement, we also acknowledge that we are regularly in competition, while we often communicate with each other, we rarely coordinate outside of certain advocacy activities that serve our direct benefit. Time and again, we heard how that leads to us spending resources on things other than the work we would rather focus on, how too often it leads to our residents falling into the gaps between us and how it leaves us at a disadvantage in trying to tackle those comprehensive and interconnected, most difficult problems when we only have One lever in our hands to pull. The next barrier that cross cut was the fact that we frequently rely and over rely on outdated models that aren’t serving us or our communities in housing. This looks like a dependence on temporary subsidies that create temporary affordability, that lead to affordability cliffs for the residents and leaves the developer on a hamster wheel trying to maintain the same number of affordable units, instead of getting a lock in permanent affordability and being able to increase the total stock of housing that people can actually afford even as their incomes grow, where entrepreneurship service organizations or esos and CDFIs focus on startups and micro finance, with entrepreneurs who are focusing on ventures with business plans that can’t reach scale and represent the highest risk businesses to underwrite, where they may be able to employ themselves but can’t reach a point in growing their business where they can reach back into the community and help others reach a living wage too, let alone build a business that can become a multi generational asset that they can pass on. It can also look like helping families work up a career ladder only to have them effectively earn less as they drop down the benefits cliff, disincentivizing them from participating further in the workforce. And it’s also across all of these a model of free technical assistance that providers can’t afford to deliver at the quality that they want to with, all the wraparound services needed to help the participants succeed even once they’re off on their own. These models often act then as temporary band aids, rather than building permanent, lasting asset, building tools for our communities and their residents.
Finally, a slew of state and local policies were raised that restrict your ability to succeed, and they were cited time and again as one of the greatest barriers to progress. These range from local zones, local zoning that restricts the scale of developments and makes it nearly impossible to build affordable housing in a financially sustainable way, to complex regulations that stifle small business starts and growth to the benefit of frequent frequently to the benefit of entrenched business interests and municipal investments that shift so frequently lack of depth and focus that they can’t reliably be used to coordinate philanthropic market capital alongside them, and even political hostility towards programs of all sorts that have been proven to have impact and have communities trust already, our systems are often working against the very outcomes we are trying to create, and changing them against these entrenched interests is the work requiring a coordinated approach involving all of us who benefit from the system, improving both directly and indirectly.
So those are the three big themes we heard. Now we want to hear from you in a moment a poll is nevermind a poll has already popped up on your screen. Please take a second and select the challenges that you feel most accurately and acute, most acutely impact your day to day work. Is it the silos, those outdated models, or maybe the restrictive policies? So we’re gonna give you all about 30 seconds or so to let us know what you think. Another couple of seconds. Appreciate your patience while we give a chance for everyone to get to weigh in. So thank you, Haley on the back end for all of our technical support on this. Please, when you can and when we’ve got good participation, please just push it forward.
There we go look at that pretty solid spread. That doesn’t surprise me. We heard a lot of these at a lot of different tables. So it looks like many of you are struggling with siloed systems, which isn’t surprising. That’s something that I’ve experienced a lot in my career as well, and that connection spice, where we just can’t bring all of our resources to bear on the residents and participants most in need. So, the fact that these are all kind of universally balanced gives me actually a lot to think on as we think through our next steps, which we’ll hear about later. So with that said, I think that’s actually a great transition, because it doesn’t just stop with the barriers. Barriers were just our first day at the conference, second day at the summit. We really got into those innovative solutions. So let’s get to talk about them a little bit now, as we lift up just a handful of those innovative solutions from our summit participants.
So and for me, at least, the most exciting part was the shift towards the solutions. So we asked our participants to think big and to be candid, you all deliver now, while there were literally hundreds, I think, 213 different solutions, after we did a cluster analysis, today, we’re going to spotlight a handful of those most powerful aha moments that each one and representing a fundamental shift in thinking, and not just a band aid on the work.
So let’s start with housing, and not just because that’s where I originally came from in community development. The core problem that we identified is that the current system treats affordable housing as a temporary product. Its affordability expires, and it does little to build long term wealth for both its residents and frequently enough, the nonprofits that develop it, whether Lynch or just state subsidized, whether rental or for affordable home ownership, we’re constantly left in a perpetual cycle of defending previously affordable units from speculative purchase and redevelopment from the market or from the redevelopment back to market rate, I should say, rather than being able to ensure steady cost increases that keep the entire housing market more stable, which benefits all of us. So the big innovation that we heard from multiple tables that I wanted to lift up is a fundamental mindset shift treating housing as a permanent community asset through various forms of Shared Equity models. So this approach can work throughout the entire continuum of housing, from permanent, supportive housing to even market rate, but centers on ensuring that the community recaptures some of the appreciation of those properties, and that that appreciation is kept in a way that keeps the market from overheating and eventually causing displacement of residents who aren’t in guaranteed affordable units. And so discussions about this included a full suite of different tools that can be used to tackle this, from community land trusts or community investment trusts to deed restrictions, limited equity co ops, the list went on and on, but all of them rest in some way on two major components, the use of a resale formula of some ilk to control the rate of appreciation and some sort of community stewardship that ensures that the Benefits and that appreciation flow back to the community and its priorities, as well as as well as the residents as they transition out. So these solutions have two major advantages, the initial subsidy isn’t lost, but it is instead recycled as the homes change hands. And while, to be fair, the residents don’t receive the full windfall of market speculation, they do get to build wealth through shield shared appreciation of the asset, and that wealth gets shared with other residents who stay in the community, even after others move out. So this is a big systems change. I’m not going to lie, although we have members across the country already working on Community Land Trust and similar models that work to capture this here in DC, we have a long history of limited equity co ops, but it’s a powerful first step that anyone can take towards this would be local policy simplification, working on legalizing ADUs or increasing density, on corridor development models that starts the conversation locally about innovative zoning And right sizing of neighborhoods while laying the groundwork in the 44 states that lack Community Land Trust specific legislation and regulation to start moving towards that. It’s an opportunity that I think we can build on together.
Next and staying in housing, to be fair, but looking at the other half of it, let’s talk about the costs of developing affordable housing. So as I said, I used to be an affordable housing developer, and this one caused a lot of the gray hairs you see in my beard. The problem raised in every housing focused dialog table is that affordable housing is trapped in a financial vice, soaring acquisition and construction prices for materials and skilled labor, combined with the high interest rates and the cost of acquiring a subsidy that creates this massive viability gap, and that then leaves developers stuck in a cycle of re engineering deals that no longer pencil out because they’ve gotten more expensive as the hold gets longer, stalling the creation of new units while the housing shortage just worsens. So this one required another big mind shift, attacking the fundamental cost structure of the development, not just searching for more subsidies to fill the gap. So this approach also centers on two different but interconnected pillars, radically reducing the physical cost of production while simultaneously lowering the financial cost of capital. It’s about re-engineering the process to make it faster, cheaper and more and more predictable from start to finish, not just value engineering a project to its lowest common form, which unfortunately, we are too frequently stuck having to do so again. There was a full suite of tools that were discussed that can be used to tackle this, and we’ll try to cover more of them in the full report coming out early next year. But right now, let’s go into depth on these late we’re going to go into depth on some of them later in the presentation as well, but for now, let’s just broadly summarize them. On production side, this includes everything from off-site construction to adaptive reuse of existing buildings. On the financial side, it could involve leveraging public lands concessional debt or even state-level programs to buy down interest rates, but all of them rest in some way on one core principle, efficiency. How do we create a faster path from concept to complete to completion, and use that to directly slash the carrying costs that kill projects? Now, again, this is a big systems change, but there are powerful steps that could be taken locally. And I’d look at local process reform. We heard a lot of talk around outdated zoning codes and slow and unpredictable permitting processes that are invisible but massive costs, cost drivers. So something like by right approval for affordable projects, or even streamlined, centralized permitting or concurrent permitting would allow for efficient construction.
So for years, the focus in small business support from ESOs and the CDFIs that fund entrepreneurship has been pushed a build from scratch model, frequently entrepreneurship by necessity or solo entrepreneurship. But this misses the single biggest economic opportunity and threat to many of our communities, which is that silver tsunami. We have a wave of business owners who are retiring, and the vast majority of those in the communities that we work in have no succession plan. This isn’t just a small gap, it’s a crisis that risk closing 1000s of viable, cash-flowing legacy businesses that currently serve community needs and frequently actually are community assets. It would vaporize local jobs and the stable revenue that those bring, and it would extract community wealth, while smaller private investment firms and other community outsiders are linking their chops looking at the opportunity to purchase and roll up the most viable of these businesses. So what if, instead, in these conversations, it was raised that we pivoted from focusing on startup and micro enterprises to acquisitions and stabilizing these legacy businesses to continue to be community assets, instead of asking emerging opera entrepreneurs to build from zero. What would it look like to train and finance them to buy these existing, profitable businesses? Now on the risk side, we heard from our bankers and CDFIs that this would be a massive game changer for risk. As one expert noted to me in a sidebar, that if we purchase an existing business with proven cash flow, we would de risk the majority of the venture. So entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is sometimes what you hear this get called elsewhere, eta, it’s a far more stable path to business ownership, even for new entrepreneurs. And it’s not just about one for one sales. There are models of this that we believe are even a more powerful approach that leverage these acquisitions for broad-based community wealth, where esos could be a primary engine converting these businesses all the way to employee ownership. So there are a full suite of tools already in the market on this from employee-owned cooperatives, which would allow for democratic control of the entity by employees themselves, and could be married with employee stock ownership plans that would then allow employees to retire and still retain their vested interest in the business to even more flexible employee ownership trusts that would allow for a mix and match of various solution sets to make sure that community is still central to an to a business as It transitions its ownership structure. These models don’t just save a business, they anchor it in the community, and can give the workers a direct state and success, build generational wealth and maintain its ability to be responsive to community need.
Now, frankly, this pivot requires an equally large structural shift from our key capital partners. Many CDFIs, including ones I’ve worked for previously, are natural financers for these community-based and mission-aligned transitions, but aren’t tooled to underwrite them. Their models are often built on asset-based real estate deals or micro finance for solo entrepreneurs or pro forma based startups, not cash flow-based acquisitions that often currently rely on seller refinancing. So for this to work, CDFIs would need to develop expertise in cash flow lending and valuing established businesses the same way PES and the secondary markets currently do, and this means creating new and more flexible loan products, becoming better at doing mezzanine debt or and as well filling the gap on the entrepreneur side to be able to navigate these complex conversion deals and get them over the finish line. Now this is again, a big operational shift, but a step that would get us there and would build the capacity for ESOs to be able to do more of this that we heard time and again was making sure we didn’t leave behind the promises we made to support single employee entrepreneurship, but making it more sustainable and more scalable. And so one of the ideas that was raised repeatedly was the use of online learning systems, whether by building their own or, frankly, even better, using already completed ones like Hoffman fast track and using these e learning tools would allow esos to free up their trainer and coach capacity to focus on helping others learn how to buy a business from the fundamentals of valuation and financial due diligence all the way to Deal structuring with the current owners, supporting communities to build business. Sorry, supporting community-built businesses to stay community-owned and responsive.
So last of the big, overarching ideas that we want to lift up, let’s talk a bit about the revolving door in human services, so a client gets help with one immediate crisis, like, say, utility assistance, but the underlying reason they’re struggling might be needing child care, so that way they can actually get more hours in their job. And that isn’t addressed because we have one tool, and we’re working with that tool with them in that moment and support isn’t coordinated. A client can face the benefits cliff, where a small raise or change in other finances can trigger a sudden loss of other vital subsidies. So they get $1 an hour raise but lose an $800 a month child care voucher, which makes that raise effectively net negative, and this punishes progress and pushes them right back to where they started, or even worse off.
Now, I saw a lot of folks talking about the need to fix for silos, and this is one that we’ve been talking about for years in the field. And one of the solutions that we’ve lifted up time and again is some idea around a No Wrong Door ecosystem approach that when a client shows up anywhere, a provider constrain can screen them, a provider can screen them for holistic needs, and as one participant raised with your permission, digitally refer you to an organization we trust In the community. And this, though, does require shared technology backbone or shared processes to move from cold hand off to warm, closed loop referrals. The last thing that we want to do is ask that same resident to have to tell their story all over again and again and again. And we all know that happens far too often as it is. Fortunately, some of these have already been developed, but they tend to be very population-specific or service provider-specific, so they’re also siloed solutions. Whether we’re talking about referral programs that are specifically focused for school age children and families in Connecticut or access points to human service systems that are really only serving in the needs of hospital systems. But the technology is just a tool. It really comes down to pairing it with holistic navigators or coaches, a person whose job includes seeing the whole family and their long-term goals and their full suite of needs armed with a Benefits Cliff calculator or other tool that they can help a client sequence their progress, timing a new job or a raise or an increase in hours, to clear the cliff and not fall off it, where we need to align the system to support not penalize economic mobility now. Having helped try to build a city-wide digital network previously, I can tell you, its a giant lift, but there are quick wins that we can get along the way. And starting by not trying to boil the ocean, let’s just start by building one true partnership. Identify your single most frequent referral partner, the agency that you send people to at every week and create a formal, warm handoff process with them. And don’t forget to change your system language to get permission from your participant to share that information. It doesn’t need to be high tech. It can be a simple, shared intake form or a dedicated staff contact, but it’s the first real step in moving from that cold hand-off to a closed-loop system, and you can get it done in the next 30 days. I know this because we did here in DC. And if that doesn’t work for you, there are other options. Consider assessing your participants to identify their top three unmet needs. That helps you identify who else you should be partnering with, or use your local benefits Cliff calculator and model the impact of a $1 raise for one of your common client profiles. Bring that aha moment to your next staff meeting, so that way others can start to understand it too. So we’re covering a lot of ground, and frankly, I’m being very concerned for time, and so hopefully we didn’t cover something – good.
Okay, so we’ve covered massive set of ideas, building permanent wealth through shared equity, innovative solutions through acquisition, providing holistic support through a No Wrong Door ecosystem. I just want to get a quick pulse from everyone that’ll help us judge where the excitement is and where we should be leaning in over the coming months. So in the chat box, if you would, please type the one phrase that feels most transformative to you, but don’t hit send yet, just type those words and hold them, and if you really feel strongly about two of them, type one first and then in a second, type the other. Send it as a separate message, but to give it a second, let everyone type, type in their answer. I’m hopeful that I’m going to see our chat explode in a second. So everyone ready? 3-2-1, send. Oh, thank you all. Oh, my goodness, I’m seeing a lot here. Okay, now, if you have a second one, now would be the time to get it tossed on in. Really appreciate all of this, and you’ll hear a little bit later. I promise you, these aren’t just these aren’t just tricks to engage you. We’re actually going to be making use of everything you’re sharing with us right now and throughout the rest of this presentation, and afterwards, you’ll hear more about that from Jacelyn at the end.
All right, so with that, I want to go a little bit deeper. So I want to talk about a couple of outliers. So we discussed three powerful shifts that we are for power system to start working on now, and I mentioned that housing, cost containment we’ve come back to, because there’s a lot of different conversations, a lot of complexity to that space. Well, now’s that time. So we’re going to dive deep into some of those really big, transformative ideas, the unicorns that show us where the system could possibly go. So I mentioned that one of the most powerful ways to lower housing costs is to attack the soft costs driven by delays. And I want to dig back into that, because it isn’t just a small tweak, it’s municipal policy and process reform that could have long-term impacts in your jurisdictions. So as I said before, we frequently get fixated on the price of lumber and labor. Those are big, sexy conversation topics, but the real project killers are the invisible costs, the loan interest, the legal fees, the insurance that stack up month after month while a project is stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of zoning hearings, permitting reviews and other stalling tactics. This uncertainty is a massive risk that kills projects long before they ever break ground, and makes pre-development financing more expensive because of that risk, it leaves us scrambling to raise that pre-development funding because it’s the hardest and highest risk by nature. So let’s talk about some of these.
First solution set that we heard was by right approval. So this is the certainty solution. It moves development from a subjective political fight to an objective administrative one. If your project meets the clear, pre established rules, you get your permit period. Wouldn’t that be nice? So, but what are those rules? Right? That’s where something like form-based zoning could come in. This is the clarity solution, instead of a complex text, heavy rule book that regulates use, commercial, here, residential, there, but not residential. That’s too dense. A form-based code focuses on the physical form of the building, its height, its shape, and how it meets the street. It’s a what we want guide, not a what we forbid, text list. It makes it incredibly clear and predictable. What can be built, which makes things like buy right approvals possible and most effective? Third would be something like concurrent permitting. This is a speed solution. It directly attacks the bureaucratic run around, where a project has to wait in a queue for the planning department, then the fire department, then public works, then later on, which finally get to construction, has to go through all those again during the inspection process, one after another after another, based on their schedule, with a concurrent process. City departments review those plans at the same time, simple technical fix that can cut, and has, in some jurisdictions, cut six-month reviews down to 30 days when it’s a community priority. Fourth, thinking about community priorities, what would it be like to have an affordable housing permitting track pulled away, and this is the prioritization solution. It’s a fast pass that pulls those projects out of the main line and gives them a way to jump right to the front. It combines things like the speed of concurrent permitting with other benefits, or could combine them with other benefits, like fee waivers and even dedicated staff to ensure that these critical projects are the top priority, not just an afterthought, and not just in queue, trying to get attention behind the multi million dollar developer who we all know is very, very well known in City Hall. So when you stack these solutions, long-term impact could be profound, you permanently de-risk the entire affordable development pipeline, and it doesn’t just help your local nonprofit finish that 10-unit project or that single-family home they’re working on. It makes their 100-unit project more financially viable because it de-risks the process. It stops forcing affordable housing developers to be expert negotiators, and lets us just be expert builders. It creates a system that could actually produce housing at the scale we need it. Next unicorn, we’ll talk about a bit. What would it look like to actually tackle the other soft costs that’s killing projects, the cost of the money itself? So even if a developer controls construction costs and gets through permitting, a project can still die on the vine, because high interest rates make the debt service, that monthly loan payment too high for those rents to do it to actually remain affordable. This viability gap isn’t about the cost to build. It’s about the cost of finance frequently, and while we can be stuck on a hamster wheel of trying to raise more subsidy, subsidy is dollar for dollar deal. It’s not highly leveraged. So the big innovation I’m going to talk about here is how we use public capital instead of just adding more subsidy to the top of the stack to try to bridge that gap. What would it look like to take state-level tools to reduce the cost of senior debt at the bottom of the stack? So it’s not just about more money, it’s about making the primary primary financing cheaper and more patient, and we already have some powerful tools that are not universally adopted to do this. And we heard about the Oregon affordable housing tax credit. It’s a brilliant example that complements the equity side solutions like Lynch. It doesn’t give a credit to the developer, it gives it to the lender, in exchange, the bank most typically gives the developer a long term loan at a dramatically below market interest rate. This permanent rate buy down, effectively paid for by the state, then directly lowers the project’s monthly mortgage payments for decades, reducing the total amount of subsidy needed over time a second crucial strategy is the use of concessional debt or patient capital. So yes, this is a loan, but its terms are more mission driven, not market driven. The lender often a CDFI foundation or even a hospital concedes a market rate profit by offering below market terms, frequently with deferred payments. This fills a critical gap in the budget without adding to the project’s monthly debt service. And there are examples of states working to incentivize this. For example, the Pennsylvania Housing Authority supports the Pennsylvania Health for Housing Investment Program. As a prime example, their state housing agency offers a hard dollar match from its own trust fund for any concessional loan. A health care entity invests effectively doubling its impact. Other states do this by embedding incentives into their Lynch scoring, giving a project extra points if it brings in patient capital as a partner, making it a near guaranteed window, a near guaranteed winner in the adjudication process, if the developer can identify the patient capital on their own. So you can probably see how the long-term impact of this could be transformative. By lowering the interest rate, you’re creating a permanent, baked-in subsidy for the life of the loan, whether that is 15 years or longer. This directly lowers the rent needed to make the project pencil out, letting us pass it on and either have market affordability on some of the units or be able to drive our affordability down further into the area median income range. It makes deals viable that would be impossible in a high market and high interest rate market down a high interest rate market environment, most importantly, it de risks the deal by leveraging far more private capital from banks that they’re than they are now comfortable lending, because risk is the enemy of being able to bring down more debt onto a deal, and this, again, is how we can build a pipeline of projects that are financially sound and could be permanently affordable.
Unicorn number three on housing, because I promised we would get into these. Let’s talk about the construction process itself. The traditional development model is incredibly fragmented. A nonprofit developer has to find, hire and coordinate an outside architect, an engineer, separate general contractor, possibly dozens of subcontractors if they don’t have those under the GC. Every single handoff is a potential point of failure, delay and cost overrun. When problems arise, tt’s a game of finger-pointing between contractors and the resulting change orders pile up, stalling a project and blowing the budget. Not every developer is large enough, but what would it look like here if, instead, smaller developers were able to come together to stop outsourcing that risk and instead embrace vertical integration together? So this is a major strategic shift where the development organization brings those core functions. Brings those core functions in-house the way the larger developers do. This could mean starting its own general contracting arm, or hiring its own architects and engineers, or building a robust construction management team, instead of having to rely on JVs and third parties, instead of managing multiple outside contracts, the developer becomes the designer and builder, creating a single, streamlined team, a single streamlined team working towards one mission. And in instances where their current pipeline doesn’t justify it, well within their bounds to build partnerships with other smaller developers and allow those fixed costs to be shared with multiple agencies gaining the benefits of vertical integration and scale.
A second way to drive down the developer side cost is modern construction technology. We spend a lot of time right now looking at additive manufacturing, 3D printing houses, because that’s the new big, big noise. But there’s also other ways to move away from stick-built to factory-built solutions. Modular housing is a great example. This approach applies those factory principles to home construction. It gives the developer greater control over pricing, because they can buy materials in bulk, minimize waste. It also reduces the soft costs because a building in a factory avoids weather delays and shortens the on-site construction timeline from months down to weeks. This is what makes it cheaper and faster than traditional construction, assuming you’re in a municipality where your local code even allows for it – many don’t still. The real power in this type of thinking, it’s in trying to retain control. Whether you start by vertically integrating your team or by piloting a factory-built project, you’re fundamentally shifting from being a price taker and a fragmented system to being a producer. This is how you gain real, predictable control over your timelines and your budget. This is how we break the old model, and it’s how we finally get to build at that speed and scale that we all know the crisis demands.
Nope. Sorry. Jacelyn, going to pass it on back to you.
Matthews 43:38
Thanks, Devin, and thank you for sharing all the information. I just want to give a kudos to Devin for leading the charge when it comes to synthesizing all this data. There were pages and pages of notes from every table, as well as the recordings that had to be synthesized even know what were the overarching themes that people really wanted us to focus on. So kudos to him for the hard work in doing so. So next is talking about, where do we go from here? How do we actually make this real? How do we turn the conversations and the dialogs that we had over a course of a day and a half to something that can actually be tangible?
So with that, we decided that the Just Economy Lab working groups was a way that we wanted to move this work forward. So coming out of the Leadership Summit, we want to keep the momentum going and turn the great discussions we had into concrete, ongoing collaboration. So the Just Economy Labs will help us do exactly that. They’ll bring together leaders from across the country to move from dialog to action and continue shaping what a just economy looks like in practice. So this means building a large tent, including both members and other thought leaders, and realizing that leadership isn’t a position in a coalition, it’s an activity that we all share in. So the goal of the Just Economy Lab is simple. We’re going to take the ideas and the challenges that surface at the summit and explore real community-informed solutions. So this might be identifying a solution that already exists but isn’t widely adopted, or helping build entirely new solutions for us to test together. We’ve already started by gathering input from you all today. So when we did the word cloud, and you kind of like give some of your responses, even with the initial poll, we’re going to use that information to help inform us about the direction we’re going with the actual Just Economy Lab. So so we’re asking for additional input from those who couldn’t be in attendance, so we will be sending us out as a recording and giving people opportunity to weigh in as well, so we can help inform which topics we move forward with.
Okay, so you’re probably wondering, okay, so how does this actually work? Right? We’re doing this lab, this working group. What does it look like and function, and how can I be involved? So we’ve already convened an internal leadership team to support the working groups. They have already been identified. They’ll review the information you’ve all shared today alongside other feedback from the summit to identify the top priorities. So each just Economy lab will include about 15 to 20 participants, representing a mix of organizations, geographies and perspectives. Will open participation for self-nominations and peer nominations, so folks can either put themselves forward or lift up others they think should be part of the conversation. Each group will have facilitation provided by NCRC, but the direction the priorities and goal outputs of each lab will be determined by the participants themselves. So these groups are designed to be collaborative, to be flexible and responsive to the needs of the members doing the work. And NCRC will also convene additional outside supports for the working groups providing additional support in the ideation and deployment process, so you are not alone in this, regardless of the solution being explored and implemented. We want to make sure that we have additional supports to kind of like, get moving from ideation to actual implementation. And then from there we’ll identify participants. So we’ll complete outreach and announce the group by the end of the year. So we kick off the first group in January 2026. There’ll be three groups total, with the first one, again starting January 2026, and our intention is that by the 2027 Summit, each lab will be able to share what they’ve learned, the solutions they’ve tested, what’s worked in their communities, and how they’re going to build on those successes and help replicate the solutions. This is about more than just meeting – this is more about building a shared space for experimentation, collaboration and impact.
So with that being said, I know that you saw us and what Devin go into detail about some of the overarching themes that we’re going to use to help, again, inform the working groups, but one that kept coming up that we weren’t sure about the direction that you all might want to go in, was the part about housing cost reduction. So this Devin discussed a few ways to reduce the cost of developing affordable housing, but the idea is being strongly considered for one of our working groups. So as you heard, there are multiple directions it could go, and we love your input to help us make sure that we’re going where you’re interested in going. So in a moment, Haley will actually put up another poll that will outline these three strategies, and we’re just hoping that you could kind of like, weigh in and tell us what you’re most interested in, either exploring directly and being part of working group or hearing more about from the working groups or the Just Economy Labs. And we’ll give it about 30 to 45 seconds for people to think about this, the direction they think we should go in, okay? And we’ll close those out. Okay, so we’re seeing here what some of the ideas are in terms of which direction we should go in. It seems that most people are leaning towards state policies to lower the cost of debt. Again, we’re using this information, and all information that we gathered via the polls and the word waterfall, think Devin named it, to help inform our decision about the direction of the the working groups, or the topics of the working groups. With that being said, I want to give us an opportunity to go over some questions that you might have had about the information that Devin shared in terms of the key topics. What people have said were some solutions that they were interested in, innovations. We would ask that if you have questions, please utilize the Q and A function, just so it helps us be able to actually find the information in the queue, in the chat and be able to answer. Okay, so we’re really thankful for all of you taking time out of your day today to be with us. We know it’s middle of the day. We know there’s many other things you could be doing, but you were interested in hearing about what came out of these conversations, whether you were present for the summit or not. We appreciate your taking time to actually be curious with us about this. So thank you for joining us on the journey from problems to prototypes. We really hope you feel energized by potential for change. Even in the midst of what’s happening in our world, we still know that there’s still things that we can do, and the work continues.
So as I mentioned, we’re going to utilize the Q and A function. If you have any questions for us, I know the question was about sharing the slide deck – we’ll not have the slide deck available, but the this is being recorded, we will share that out as well as all of our findings, once everything has been completed with that as well.
And I see two questions in the chat. I mean, the Q A box, and it seems like Devin is already answering, so I’ll let him answer.
Thompson 51:03
So one of them I actually need a little more elaboration on, so I just sent that back to the person. And so I’ll say we did get one on someone looking for more information on how to secure capital for non-traditional borrowers to be able to access those, those silver tsunami businesses, the transitional businesses. And that’s the real joy of cash flow-based transactions, is that it’s about the standing of the business, not the standing of the borrower, although the borrower standing is still a piece of the puzzle that needs to get solved for. But businesses with a productive cash flow are underwritable based on their cash flow, in principle, and that’s part of why you saw that getting lifted up as a possible unicorn solution.
Matthews
All right, so we’ll give it another second or so…
Thompson
Jacelyn, see that one for you, want to tackle that one.
Matthews
Yeah, see it now. Will the lab be across the country to enable more groups to use it? So we are having people who are representative of organizations from across the country. Yes, it will not be just relegated to one particular area. We are hoping that the groups can be a mix and be representative of multiple geographies, because we know that there’s going to be things that each other can help, to help parse out ideas and think think about things. So whether it’s urban, rural, small, large, whatever the case might be, it will be representative of multiple groups and geographies.
Thompson 52:29
So thank you for the person who came back and gave me the elaboration. So I’m going to paraphrase the question back in, why not or what would it look like to do this work with employees and workers who are not currently credit-worthy. And I think this is actually where things like employee cooperatives really do work incredibly well, because it’s not on any one worker to be credit worthy, or one worker who is not credit worthy does not sink the ship a combination of diversifying the risk pool by having multiple employees and being able to finance based on the cash flow of the business allows for those transactions to work. In a couple of examples, we’ve seen one actually up in Baltimore, where a community health worker, collaborative business, community health worker, sorry, CNA, a nursing assistant collaborative did that where a number of them were not individually able to be underwritten, but as a group could be. Hopefully, that answers your question.
Matthews
And I see we have a couple of minutes left, so I actually want to pass it on to Haley talk about some next steps, but I will say also be on the lookout for again, for the recording of this. If you know other people who want to be a part of this conversation but couldn’t join today, we ask that you pass it along to them. So we really do want to hear from them about ideas, about the direction of the just economy labs, and also to be able to nominate yourself or someone else who you think should be a part of the conversation. We want to make sure that we are hearing from you about that as well. And Haley, I’ll pass it to you.
Schneider 54:17
Everybody. Thank you so much for attending. I just wanted to drop in the chat some upcoming events that we have here in CRC, April 14 through 15 of 2026, we have our Just Economy Conference, which is our annual event. We would love to see you there. Our schedule just dropped for that. So you can see the link in the chat, and then you will also see the link for a webinar survey form, just to hear about how we did. So if you have any feedback or any things that you really appreciated want to see again, please let us know, and thank you so much for attending.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
