2024 Global Award for Excellence Winner

In 2015, Austin, Texas’ mayor at the time, Steve Adler, brought together business leaders, real estate professionals, and housing experts to take on the crisis in affordable rental housing and the risks it posed to the city’s workforce stability and economic sustainability. With insights and research from a ULI Technical Advisory Panel and ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, the Austin Housing Conservancy fund was born, offering a revolutionary approach to preserving workforce housing. Now known as the Texas Housing Conservancy, the fund became the nation’s first to combine a nonprofit investment manager, Affordable Central Texas, with an open-end private equity fund.

David Steinwedell, board chair and founder of the Texas Housing Conservancy, was involved from the beginning in his then-role as executive director of ULI Austin. “In partnership with the Terwilliger Center at ULI and NeighborWorks America, we conducted a marketplace scan of the housing available in Austin,” Steinwedell says. “We found that only a few private equity funds were providing moderate-income housing or workforce housing. If they were, they were using a closed-end fund, and with those, there is no guarantee that the housing will stay affordable in the future.” Most equity owners, he adds, have the obligation to maximize financial returns to their investors, and the only way to do that is to put the property back on the market—usually at market rates.