Richard Lake, co-founder of Roadside Development; Jeff Olivet, founder of the Olivet Group, former director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, and advisor to ULI’s Homeless to Housed Initiative; and Lionel Lynch, head of Workforce Housing Solutions at J.P. Morgan Commercial Real Estate.
ULI/Sibley Fleming
Last week, during ULI Washington’s Fourth Annual Future Forum, held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., a panel titled “Housing from All Angles” brought together three experts to examine the intersection of homelessness, development, and housing finance.
The session featured Jeff Olivet, founder of the Olivet Group, former director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, and advisor to ULI’s Homeless to Housed initiative; Lionel Lynch, head of Workforce Housing Solutions at J.P. Morgan Chase; and Richard Lake, cofounder of Roadside Development. Chelsea Allinger of Greater Greater Washington moderated the discussion.
Olivet opened with this message: “Fundamentally, [homelessness] is a housing situation.” He told the audience that Washington, D.C., ranks in the top 20 nationally in per capita homelessness. However, the District has still managed to cut its homeless population by 13 percent since 2017, primarily by reducing family homelessness.
Citing the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Olivet pointed out that there are only 35 affordable and available rental units for every 100 extremely low-income households nationwide. “The question isn’t why we have so much homelessness,” Olivet said. “It’s why we don’t have more.”
Olivet described homelessness as “a really deadly game of musical chairs” and argued that the post–World War II housing boom, despite its flaws, proved that an abundant supply can nearly eliminate widespread homelessness. He highlighted ULI’s Homeless to Housed case studies—such as Avivo Village in Minneapolis and medical-respite projects in Hawaii—and released the initiative’s new “10 Principles for Addressing Homelessness,” a document written explicitly for developers and lenders.
Lynch challenged the room’s default mindset. “Everyone operates under an assumption of scarcity,” he said, explaining why capital continues to chase the same narrow pool of investors. Lynch heads a J.P. Morgan Chase unit that is only two and a half years old, yet it has already closed deals that traditional affordable-housing finance cannot touch. Lynch walked the audience through four transactions:
- Denver Health invests $15,000 per workforce unit and saves $200,000 annually in unreimbursed ER care
- Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston created an internal flexible-financing fund that fills gaps in deals to improve patient outcomes; J.P. Morgan Chase connected the health system to a local developer whose project would not otherwise pencil
- Howard University, with a bridge loan from Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund, converted a planned market-rate building into 80 restricted workforce units for faculty and graduate students
- A Class A multifamily property in San Diego was financed 100 percent by a pension fund using its fixed-income allocation—no LIHTC, no public subsidy—simply because the fund accepted a longer hold period for stable cash flow
“It’s not their philanthropy group that’s investing in housing,” Lynch emphasized. “It’s the chief medical office.”
Lake was blunt about costs and policy: “We have stories of affordable units costing $800,000 to $1 million [per unit]. Does anybody find that absolutely absurd?”
He argued that restricted condo owners pay full fees yet capture none of the appreciation, and he urged a return to pathways like the ones created by the postwar GI Bill. “We need to be thinking about people, not units,” he said, adding that the District should plan for a million residents again—its 1950 peak—to make services and infrastructure economically viable.
The Q&A returned repeatedly to the District’s Comprehensive Plan amendment process now underway. Lake called it “the single biggest economic-development driver D.C. will experience in the next 25 years” and insisted that the Office of Planning should stop striking the words “economic development” from drafts. He advocated tax abatements for deed-restricted projects, minor strategic changes to the Federal Height Act (i.e. higher height limits, noting most people cannot visually distinguish 75 feet from 90 feet [23 m from 27m]), and an end to celebrating unit counts over human outcomes.
Lynch pushed planners to set affordability requirements that actually attract new capital. “Stop defaulting to 60 percent of AMI just because that’s the LIHTC definition,” he said. “Require units to be a meaningful discount to market—that’s what hospitals and pension funds understand.”
Olivet closed the loop by citing Kaiser Permanente’s revolving loan fund for supportive housing, United Healthcare’s patient-utilization investments, Amazon’s ongoing commitments to supporting affordable housing, and Cisco’s prevention partnership in Silicon Valley as proof that mission-driven capital is already moving when the business case is clear.
The panelists’ bottom line was unanimous: Homelessness and the broader workforce housing crunch are symptoms of the same disease—too little supply at prices working people can pay. The cures, they said, are new investors who see housing as an operational asset, policy that stops inflating costs, and a planning framework that treats growth as the solution, not the problem.
