2021 Symposium: Richard F. Burns, President & CEO, NHPF
The 5th Annual NHP Foundation Symposium, A Decade of Rental Housing Vulnerability: Lessons from Financial Crisis to Coronavirus, wouldn’t be possible without participation from sponsors, partners, attendees, speakers, and staff. Thank you all for making this annual event such a collaborative success. Today’s Symposium explores what we’re learning from ten years of housing challenges, beginning with the Great Recession to the pandemic that brought the world to its knees. 2020 certainly provided us with time to reflect on how our industry must reckon with these challenges—the impacts and ill effects that have created a country where no single county has enough affordable housing, to near daily reckonings of years of institutionalized racism to the ravishes of increased regional flooding and fires and questionable governmental policy decisions. Which brings us to today, where, although we are not quite in a “post-pandemic” world, we are fortunate enough to be together with other like-minded individuals to hold up a spotlight to the issues and forge fresh paths forward with the knowledge of years past. This year’s program, A Decade of Rental Housing Vulnerability: Lessons Learned from Financial Crisis to Coronavirus, features extraordinary examples of collaboration beginning with recognition for lawmakers who work across the aisle to prioritize housing legislation for people of low to moderate income and strive to make a difference. We will hear incisive reporting from Enterprise Community Partners, with whom we collaborated to produce a survey of decision-makers and influencers throughout the affordable housing spectrum including developers, federal, state and local elected officials and policymakers. The survey’s focus is on the factors that have contributed to the vulnerability of affordable housing throughout the last decade, drawing insights from three periods of the timeline that brought us here today:
Great Recession & Aftermath (2008–2011) Rebuilding in a Divided US (2012–2019) Pandemic & Social Upheaval (2020–2021)
Takeaways from this research serve to inform Conversations with top representatives from the important disciplines that help the industry create and preserve affordable housing and whose opinions we greatly respect as we shape affordable housing strategies for the future. Finally we will provide a look at how your generous contributions work hard onsite at our properties and some examples of young residents who have benefited. Our goal, as always is to inspire more dialog about how we in the affordable housing ecosystem can create meaningful change. So, let’s continue to converse, collaborate and cooperate on solutions we can all be a part of going forward. Again, thank you to all of the elected officials, housing experts, and speakers as well as our sponsors and attendees. That you have chosen to continue to support NHPF’s mission of providing pathways that residents can follow to achieve their own goals is extremely powerful and we appreciate each and every one of you. We hope you will enjoy our program and come away invigorated for the work ahead.
12 A Decade of Rental Housing Vulnerability: Lessons from Financial Crisis to Coronavirus
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