To talk to Karen Lado, director of the
Enterprise Foundation’s Denver office, it is hard to imagine her
anywhere other than at the helm of a community development
organization, and harder still to envision a better position for
someone who thinks the affordable housing crisis is
public policy priority number one for her community and for the nation as a
whole.
The challenge, she says, is not simply to build affordable housing. “We know how to do that.” It is to change the systems that make building affordable housing so difficult by changing the way elected officials and the public at large think about this issue.
That was the idea behind Housing Denver, a coalition of housing advocacy groups Karen brought together initially to educate candidates for Mayor and City Council about the importance of affordable housing. Its election-oriented mission completed, the coalition has continued as an advocate for affordable housing policies.
"We recognize that we have to do more than just assert a need for affordable housing," Karen says. "We also have to make concrete policy suggestions and then advocate effectively for those ideas."
Karen's concern about affordable housing predates her involvement in community development, and she attributes it in part to her parents. "I grew up with a strongly-held belief that everyone deserves a certain level playing field," she explains. "We are the wealthiest country on the planet, but we have people living on the street. We are the richest country in the world, but the number of kids living in poverty has been increasing. How can that possibly be right?"
That sense of social
justice has fueled a continuing passion for community development,
but her career path did not follow a straight line in that
direction. Born into an academic family and anticipating an
academic career for herself, she majored in biology as an
undergraduate at Cornell. An excellent student, as her magna cum
laude degree attests, Karen found that the sciences satisfied
her intellectual curiosity, but not her desire to 'do things'. So
she headed to Washington to explore a long-standing interest in
public policy, using her science background to secure a research
post in the Environmental Protection Agency.
Still looking for
opportunities to 'do things' as well as to study them, she answered
an ad from the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights
organization, which was looking for someone with bi-lingual skills.
Karen's parents are both from Spain, so she had grown up speaking
Spanish, but in a community that did not have a very large Hispanic
population. The La Raza position, she says, "gave me a chance to
get to know the Latino culture. But working from D.C.," she
explains, "I felt I had started at the wrong end of the community
development spectrum. I wanted to go into the field."
La Raza sent her to Arizona, where a year spent working on rural wastewater projects and housing development initiatives provided her first introduction to “community development on the ground.”
Still contemplating an
academic career, Karen completed a Masters program in Political
Science at the University of Madison in Wisconsin, but soon
realized, “I wanted to do something much more applied and
community-focused.
I didn’t just want to write about good public
policy or the good things people were doing; I wanted to do those
things myself.”
She then used a National Science Foundation research grant to obtain a second Masters degree, this one in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From this point, a career path that had been somewhat irregular becomes, in her words, “a bit more linear. When I left college and went to graduate school the first time, I knew I was interested in physical development and housing, but I was struggling to find where I belonged in the system.” Her work at MIT, where she focused on housing and urban development policy, helped to clarify her thinking.
A research position at the World Bank provided an opportunity to travel for consulting assignments that took her to Central and Eastern Europe. A colleague, aware of her bi-lingual skills, recommended her for a position as a project manager at Chemonics International, Inc., a Washington, D.C. consulting firm, where she headed teams working on a variety of government reform projects in Bolivia and Venezuela. Four years later, she was ready for a change.
“As a
consultant, you’re always moving from project to project and from
country to country,” she explains. While she found the variety
stimulating, she also found it a bit frustrating. “You never get to
see anything through. You spend a lot of time building
relationships, but then you have to leave them behind. I wanted to
do 
something that allowed me to put down roots. I wanted to be able
not just to build relationships, but also to build on them.”
She picked her location first, attracted by Denver’s mix of urban amenities and “old western tradition,” its diverse population, and its “strong Hispanic culture.” The city’s natural beauty and “great weather” added to its appeal.
The job search came next, and the opening in the Enterprise Foundation’s Denver office was the first position for which she applied. Looking back on it now, Karen says she had no doubt that this was absolutely the right job for her, and by the end of a long interviewing process, she had convinced her employers-to-be that “everything I had done up until then made sense and prepared me for this position.”
Her experience as a consultant had honed the project management, relationship-building, and trouble-shooting skills she needed for community development work; her experience in Latin America helped shape her perspective on what was needed and what was possible.
“Working in Latin America,” she explains, “I felt that, even without government corruption, there weren’t enough resources to address the problems. In the United States, we have the resources, but we lack the individual understanding and the political will necessary to make the changes. The problems are solvable, but the most we do is nip around the edges of the solutions.” The Enterprise Foundation job appealed, she says, because it gave her the opportunity to tackle some of those “big picture” problems head-on, but on a local stage, “where it is possible to effect changes and to see the results.”
A large part of her work at Enterprise involves establishing and nourishing relationships with the non-profit community development corporations that Enterprise and Living Cities support
with technical assistance, grants, and loans. “I’m not a developer,” Karen acknowledges. “I don’t know one-tenth of what my developer partners know about that field. But I do understand what they need to be effective, and that’s my job – to understand what’s needed and to find ways to provide it.”
One example is the Mile High Housing Fund. Enterprise Denver founded this community development financial institution, with financial support from Living Cities, in partnership with the City and County of Denver, the Fannie Mae Foundation and US Bank, to provide predevelopment, acquisition and construction financing for affordable housing developments. “We saw a need for a nimble local funding entity able to make the quick loan decisions CDCs needed to compete for property” in Denver’s red-hot housing market, Karen explains.
Early in her tenure at Enterprise Denver, Karen discovered that the community development arena had evolved differently in Denver than in Boston (where she had gone to school), and many other cities, where development groups had traditionally focused on encouraging development in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. In Denver, Karen says, the 1990s boom years “turned our development dynamic on its head.” As a result, CDCs were concerned not with encouraging development, but with combating some of its negative consequences, primarily, the unrelenting decade-long increase in the cost of housing.
“We saw here and elsewhere that the high cost of housing wasn’t a problem only for the homeless and the disabled and the very low-income,” she says. “A large chunk of the working population was also struggling with rental housing costs.”
The affordability gap would not be as severe if incomes were keeping pace with rising housing costs. But globalization and related forces have created what analysts describe as a “split” economy, with a declining number of high-paying high technology jobs at the top and an increasing number of minimum-wage, service/retail jobs at the bottom. As a result, Karen notes, “One-third of our workforce in Denver isn’t making enough money to compete in the local housing market.”
Traditional economic development theory holds that if you create employment opportunities workers “will take it from there,” finding housing they can afford. But that theory doesn’t work, Karen says, in a market in which a large percentage of the jobs available don’t pay salaries high enough to cover housing costs. The traditional focus on jobs, training, and education is still crucial, she agrees, but shelter has to come first in the community development equation. “If you’re a single mom with two kids sleeping on a friend’s sofa, it’s hard to think about going back to school or getting the training you need to get a higher wage job.”
And even if that single mom manages to land a better-paying job, she will be replaced by other workers earning the same low wage and facing the same critical unmet housing needs. In that sense, Karen explains, affordable housing is as much an issue for employers as it is for their employees. “If employers are going to create the stable, service workforce they need to fill these low-end jobs,” she argues, “they are going to have to find a way to address these other aspects of peoples’ lives.”
This isn’t a dilemma that exists in Denver alone, she acknowledges. “But we’re at the extreme end of a growing reality in cities across the country.” To deal with that reality, she says, CDCs in Denver and elsewhere “will have to think differently about what we’re doing.” And that means thinking not just about how to produce affordable housing, but about how to change the political structure surrounding those initiatives.
CDCs know how to build affordable housing, Karen says, but producing housing on the scale needed to meet the growing demand will require exponential increases in financial resources and sweeping changes in land use policy that can be achieved only by making affordable housing the public policy priority it has never been before.
“Affordable housing has to be an agenda item for elected officials,” she explains. It has to become part of the economic development agenda, so when the head of the local economic development department sits down to talk about converting a strip mall into a mixed-use development, affordable housing is on the radar screen and there is no question that it will be an integral part of the development plan.”
It is also clear that those education efforts must be aimed not just at the officials who make public policy, but also at the local residents who influence it and whose “not-in-my-back-yard” opposition to development can be extremely difficult to overcome. “If we’re going to change the way elected officials think about affordable housing, we have to change the dialogue; we have to change who policy makers hear from on this issue, and we have to change what they hear,” Karen explains.
“We have a lot of experience building affordable housing,” she continues. “We know a lot less about changing the political system and about building community support for an issue that isn’t on the radar screen.” But that, increasingly, is the end game for community development organizations, and it’s a game that Karen says Enterprise and its Denver partners are just beginning to learn how to play.
“I’d like to get to a place where we define a set of overarching goals shared by the nonprofit housing industry, city government, and funders of housing and physical redevelopment work, and where [all those players] agree on where we are, on what we want to build, and on how we want to build it.”
That shared vision remains a distant goal, she acknowledges, but an achievable one. “Do I think everything will be perfect 10 years from now? Of course not. But I do think we will have more resources allocated for affordable housing and that we will be using those resources more effectively,” and that CDCs will have learned a lot more about how to advance affordable housing on the public policy agenda.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Karen talks at length about community development strategies and challenges, about affordable housing complexities and goals. But she doesn’t talk about being frustrated by the scope of the problems or discouraged by the slow pace of change. On the contrary, she insists, “I’m more optimistic now than I have been in many years, because I know these problems can be solved.”
It is her conviction — not just that the problems are solvable, but that they are also worth solving — that attracted Karen to community development in the first place and that keeps her there today.
“Community development work gives those of us who need instant gratification a chance to effect change and see its impact,” she explains. And while she may not get the same direct satisfaction as the developers who actually produce the housing, Karen says, “I work with those people, and their feelings trickle down. I get to work with some of the most inspiring, amazing, creative people you would ever get a chance to meet,” she adds, “and every now and again I see a glimpse of the solutions we’re trying to find. That keeps me going.”