An article quoting CEO Maurice Jones in The Mercury News delved into the reasons LISC was chosen by Facebook, the city of East Palo Alto and Silicon Valley community groups to manage a multi-million dollar affordable housing fund: our track record of putting community needs at the forefront, including bringing employment, health and other needed services into the mix.
The excerpt below is from:
Fund manager hopes to quadruple Facebook’s $18.5 million housing fund
by Kevin Kelly, Bay Area News Group
The new manager of a Facebook funding account for affordable housing intends to take the $18.5 million already stashed aside and quadruple it.
Local Initiatives Support Corp., a national nonprofit, says it plans to leverage the money in Facebook’s Catalyst Housing Fund through loans issued to other banking institutions at interest.
The East Palo Alto City Council on Monday tapped Local Initiatives to administer the fund, created from a November 2016 agreement the city executed between Facebook and community organizations. The fund’s purpose is to build hundreds of affordable housing units in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.
Local Initiatives CEO Maurice Jones said in an interview last week that the $75 million the agency hopes to leverage would finance construction of more than 500 housing units over the agreement’s five-year term, which could be extended.
“Nobody is coming in and saying there’s a cap on what we want to do,” Jones said. “We’re confident we can get this done, meet these objectives of building over 500 units. … If we can get more done, I don’t imagine anybody would put the brakes on.” Continued [+]...