affordable-housing | July 1, 2021

Enterprise Community Partners closes $229 million affordable and workforce housing equity fund

Roodgally Senatus
ImpactAlpha Editor

Roodgally Senatus

ImpactAlpha, July 1 –  The $229 million Enterprise Preservation Fund seeks to acquire and preserve $800 million in existing affordable and workforce rental housing, or more than 7,500 units, over two years. Investors include major banks, family offices, life insurance companies and foundations, Enterprise’s Chris Herrmann told ImpactAlpha.

The fund has made 10 investments, totaling about 3,000 units, in Columbia, S.C. and Newark, Del., Cleveland, Chicago, Houston and Seattle.

“There are affordability challenges everywhere. It’s not limited to only the high-cost markets like New York and San Francisco,” said Herrmann. ”The products we’ve found and invested in those markets are properties that are really on the cusp of losing that affordability and displacing families.”

Enterprise Preservation Fund supplements Enterprise’s Equitable Path Forward Initiative, a five-year plan to catalyze $3.5 billion to diversify the real estate industry and create affordable rental housing in Black, Indigenous and other minority communities (see, “Netflix invests $25 million in Enterprise’s Equitable Path Forward”).

Enterprise will invest in, and with, developers and rental housing services providers of color to help them grow their businesses.