Tulsa’s $120 Million Housing Fund Targets Financing Gaps and Local Capacity

Affordable housing deals often need several kinds of money, each doing a different job. Lisa Albers of BOK Financial described a typical capital stack as construction and permanent debt alongside equity, often raised through the sale of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. Those sources produce many units, she said, but they do not always cover the full cost of a project. A financing gap remains between what it costs to build and operate housing and the rents residents can afford.

The Tulsa Housing Impact Fund is meant to bring additional capital to that gap while strengthening the local capacity to develop and preserve housing. Robin Hughes, president and CEO of the Housing Partnership Network (HPN), said the fund’s goal is to raise $120 million from philanthropic capital, bank financing, and local government resources. The local philanthropic community helped secure $27 million in local financing, which Hughes described as a key driver in getting the fund started. The city also selected HPN to administer local housing dollars, providing long-term subsidy for affordable-housing investment.

In the fund’s first year, Hughes reported about $7.5 million in commitments or closings for roughly 800 affordable units, alongside a pipeline of more than $150 million in capital opportunities. She described the fund as focused on increasing both production and preservation across Tulsa, with particular attention to North Tulsa.

The structure is intended to connect national resources with local decision-making. HPN manages the fund, but Hughes said the organizers wanted a locally based nonprofit supported and governed by local representatives, while bringing national partners into the work. The fund’s board includes philanthropic partners, local government, and national leaders in the housing sector. Hughes said the team also listened to Tulsa developers, especially emerging and rising developers, to understand where they struggled to obtain capital. That input informed financing products and underwriting structures intended to meet the needs of different developers and communities.

These choices reflect a broader point made by the panel: assembling money is not enough if the organizations responsible for development cannot use it, or if the financing arrives at the wrong stage. Tulsa’s fund brings together local subsidy, philanthropy, bank debt, and HPN’s national network, while its local governance and developer outreach are meant to make that capital usable in the city.

The effort began through HPN’s place-based work with CDFI Friendly America and CDFI Friendly Tulsa, supported by the Zarrow Foundation. HPN is a national membership organization that works with about 126 affordable-housing developers and housing-focused community development financial institutions, or CDFIs. Hughes said the initial visits to Tulsa found local willingness to address housing affordability and homelessness, stakeholder support for solutions, and local-government backing. A year later, HPN brought members to the city and set out to build development and capital capacity, collaborate with local stakeholders, and address the effects of disinvestment and injustice in places including Greenwood and North Tulsa.

The fund’s local focus also sits within Tulsa’s longer history. David Williams, managing director of the Lafayette Square Institute, referred to the 1,256 Project, which aims to rebuild and repair 1,256 homes for Black Tulsans in commemoration of homes destroyed during the race massacre. He described it as a community using the history of trauma to build toward a different future. Hughes’s account of the fund similarly emphasized local partnership and reconciliation alongside the work of financing housing.

The fund’s measures of success include the pace of deployment and production, whether capital reaches developers who typically lack access to it, and whether Tulsa attracts larger-scale development. Hughes also pointed to the ability to leverage additional regional, national, private, philanthropic, and government resources. She said developers had begun coming to Tulsa after the fund’s announcement and the availability of early city subsidy—something she said the city had not seen three years earlier. Tulsa’s mayor had set a goal of addressing a need for about 6,000 units, Hughes said; the fund is intended to contribute through both new housing and preservation of existing stock.

Albers’s account of the capital stack helps explain why the participants are not interchangeable. Banks can provide construction and permanent debt and can invest in funds, but some lending that CDFIs undertake falls outside what banks would normally do, given their lending practices and regulatory constraints. BOK Financial, Albers said, agreed to act as agent for the Tulsa fund’s senior debt facility. That arrangement lets bank capital flow into a fund whose manager can deploy it where it is most needed.

For Albers, partnership is part of the financing infrastructure. Not every community has a large national developer or a housing authority with extensive capacity. Local organizations can nevertheless go further by working with those partners, she said. Her point was not that every institution should do every kind of lending, but that a fund can connect the different roles: banks supply capital within their capacity, while a fund manager and community partners direct it toward needs that may not fit a bank’s ordinary lending.

Harold Pettigrew, president and CEO of Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), described CDFIs as mission-driven lenders that help capital reach places where it is needed. He called them “last-mile funders” and said they can also be first responders in emergencies. CDFIs work across housing, small business, child care, health facilities, and other community assets. Where there is not a robust ecosystem of community-minded lenders, he said, it is difficult to ensure that the range of local needs is served.

Pettigrew’s account also clarifies why flexible capital matters to the institutions deploying it. OFN is itself a CDFI and invests in about 200 member organizations. It provides balance-sheet capital across the membership rather than directing each organization’s individual lending. The aim, he said, is to give local institutions flexibility to invest where they operate. Drawing on his own seven years running a CDFI in Washington, D.C., Pettigrew described effective funders as partners who recognize local expertise and trust local organizations to put capital to work.

The source of capital drives the character of capital. The character of capital influences the deployment of that capital into communities.

Pettigrew argued that flexible, long-term capital gives local organizations room to be creative and responsive. CDFIs are often among the organizations working to keep capital flowing during an economic downturn or disaster, but their capacity is constrained by the flexibility and affordability of the money they can access. A bank loan into a local fund, a flexible investment in a CDFI, and a subsidy for a particular housing project may all support housing, but they answer different needs. One may provide senior debt; another may strengthen an institution’s balance sheet; another may close a project’s cost gap.

Hughes described HPN’s work with CDFI members as another way of translating national tools into locally delivered housing. Inspire 100 is a mortgage product for low-wealth individuals that offers 100% loan-to-value financing without a mortgage insurance requirement. About a dozen HPN CDFI members offer the product in their local markets. Hughes said it is intended to reduce barriers to homeownership and help build wealth through owning a home.

She also described a developer in Atlanta who used New Markets Tax Credits to expand homeownership in his local market. Hughes said he had told HPN that he would not have been able to scale his work without the program. HPN also invests in its CDFI members, providing early capital that banks may not typically provide so those members can produce and preserve multifamily housing.

These examples show the range of activity the panel grouped under community investment. Some capital supports rental housing; some supports a lender’s capacity to make local investments; some is structured around homeownership. The common element is not a single financing product but the attempt to match capital and delivery organizations to a specific barrier.

RJ McGrail of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy emphasized that the development process needs capital at the right time. A project may need subsidy during predevelopment or throughout a holding period, he said, while construction lending may be possible without subsidy in some markets. The appropriate mix depends on local conditions and on whether bank capital or other resources are available. In his account, the question is not simply how much subsidy a project receives, but where in the deal cycle that support is most useful.

McGrail illustrated the role of public institutions with Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the Lincoln Institute has worked with local partners. The city created a public development corporation with the statutory powers of a housing authority. Instead of selling real estate to developers, the corporation holds it over the long term and can use ground leases and other arrangements. McGrail said public ownership preserves local agency over what happens on the land and can create opportunities to build wealth.

The Chattanooga partnership brings together city staff, the development corporation, community organizations, and local philanthropy, including businesses and family philanthropies. McGrail described the public owner as a way to maintain long-term public value, while private capital is aligned and incentivized to come in at the appropriate point. A project may need public or philanthropic support during predevelopment or while the property is held, while other sources may be available for construction. The partnership is a means of coordinating those resources rather than requiring one provider to carry the entire project.

Creating a new public institution is a substantial undertaking, McGrail acknowledged, and not every community needs to establish a new development corporation. Housing authorities already exist across the country and have significant powers. The broader possibility, he said, is to build institutions that can hold land and support development over time, using existing structures where they are sufficient and creating new ones where the local situation calls for them.

That kind of public partnership can also change the scale at which money is raised. McGrail said working with a public entity can make it possible to assemble a pipeline in the nine figures more quickly than raising money deal by deal. Such a partnership can provide access to public markets and public finance and debt tools, as well as longer-term, patient capital. Those resources can help banks and CDFIs enter transactions at a point where their capital can have greater value.

McGrail extended the argument to Atlanta, where the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation was established with housing-authority powers to steward land over the long term. He warned against giving away land simply to get a project built: the project may be completed, but the land is then no longer available for the community and its residents to benefit from ownership over generations.

He also described land readjustment, in which families give up land for a public project and receive improved parcels in return. McGrail used the development of Washington, D.C.’s federal district as an example: families gave up farmland along the river and received other parcels, some of which were later sold for embassies. He said descendants of some of those families have generational wealth tied to the land.

The Lincoln Institute analyzed publicly held, transit-accessible land, McGrail said, and estimated that state and local entities held about 276,000 acres. He distinguished these parcels from large federal lands in the American West, describing instead sites such as small infill parcels in Tulsa, land near downtown Baltimore, and rural parcels around a community college. Depending on how much density communities were willing to accept, he estimated that the acreage could support between two and seven million housing units.

For McGrail, the land estimate is connected to the same system-building argument as the Chattanooga example. Public land can be a financing and development resource if it is joined to public institutions, catalytic CDFI capital, bank and market tools, and public finance. The land by itself does not supply the full development system; the public owner can help create a framework in which private and community capital enter at the right time.

When asked why the private market had not supplied enough middle- and low-income housing, Hughes focused on project economics. Developers cannot always earn an adequate return while charging rents affordable to the people the housing is meant to serve. They may be unable to secure enough debt to cover the project’s costs. Public subsidies from local, state, and federal government help close the difference between the cost of producing housing and the rents residents can afford.

That explanation distinguishes the affordability gap from a simple shortage of lending. A project may have construction and permanent debt, tax-credit equity, and a capable developer, yet still not support rents low enough for the intended residents. In Tulsa, the fund is intended to bring additional subsidy and other capital into that space while supporting developers with different levels of experience and access to financing.

The policy question is how to make that support work at a wider scale. Hughes called for a national housing strategy, arguing that affordability affects urban, suburban, and rural communities and recurs in local, state, and national elections. The current delivery system, she said, has been in use for decades. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is producing housing as intended, but the system overall is antiquated, complex, and insufficient.

A national strategy, in Hughes’s view, would streamline affordable-housing production and address demand and supply, federal housing agencies, state and local government, and the private capital market. She pointed to 2029 as a possible moment to reshape how the country addresses housing affordability, homelessness, and community-building.

McGrail agreed that the United States has not had a national housing strategy, describing the country’s approach as a series of market-adjacent interventions. He argued that housing policy relies heavily on the tax code and should make use of tools beyond tax provisions. Housing policy, he said, belongs alongside economic competitiveness, business creation, wealth creation, and technology policy as a matter of economic opportunity.

His proposal to make greater use of publicly held land connects that national argument to the place-based examples. The estimate of two to seven million potential homes depends on density and on linking the land to financing and institutions that can support development. McGrail presented public land as a resource that could be organized for housing, not as a substitute for the development and capital ecosystem required to build.

Pettigrew was less optimistic that the federal government could reach agreement on housing policy. He nevertheless argued for making existing programs more predictable and less complex, and for pursuing solutions at state and local levels. Financing programs can require specialized expertise and additional participants, he said, increasing the cost of deals. He pointed to the complexity of New Markets Tax Credits and argued that programs do not need to be so difficult to use.

Pettigrew said New Markets Tax Credits had recently become permanent, and argued that permanence and predictability make capital sources easier to rely on and leverage. He urged people to pursue federal policy changes where possible while also supporting state and local creativity. His advice was to work with institutions and people already doing the work before creating new ones, and to ask what established organizations could accomplish with additional catalytic investment.

The participants therefore differed in emphasis rather than in the underlying diagnosis. Hughes called for a national framework that rethinks delivery; McGrail emphasized tools beyond the tax code and the use of public land; Pettigrew focused on predictable programs, simpler financing, and stronger local institutions. The Tulsa fund brings these concerns together at a local level: public subsidy and bank debt matter, but so do the capacity of local organizations, the terms of capital, and the structure through which projects are brought forward.

The question of financing affordable housing is not identical to the question of financing nonprofit housing without a conventional return. An audience member who chairs a local nonprofit building micro-villages for people experiencing chronic homelessness asked about capital sources beyond philanthropy and awards. The questioner described one development with 63 homes, built for less than $100,000 per home, and wanted to know what other sources might support more units.

Pettigrew offered a framework for looking for capital rather than naming a specific program for micro-villages. He identified five broad sources of capital for CDFI activity: government; high-net-worth individuals; foundations and other philanthropy; nonfinancial corporations; and financial institutions. Within each category, he said, there may be additional investors or structures to explore. Financial institutions include more than banks; Pettigrew mentioned insurers and private equity as potential areas to investigate. Within philanthropy, OFN was developing relationships around donor-advised funds.

His answer returned to the question of matching willing capital with an appropriate structure. The challenge is not only finding an investor who wants to support the work, but determining whether a financing arrangement can connect that money to a project’s needs. A micro-village, a rental development using tax-credit equity, and a CDFI’s balance-sheet lending are different activities, even when they serve overlapping community goals.

Pettigrew said that when a capital provider is willing and has control over resources, he can assemble the right people to help deploy it. That offer reflects the panel’s broader argument: financing gaps are not solved by a single source of money. They require capital providers, public institutions, community lenders, developers, and local partners to work out where money can enter, what risks it can take, and what outcomes the project can support.