Bay Area Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Fund Launches

Equitable transit-oriented development (TOD) projects improve the lives of low income people and create healthier, financially strong and culturally vibrant communities by locating affordable housing and community services near public transit. Many low income people spend a disproportionate share of their income on costs related to housing and transportation. TOD helps alleviate this burden by reducing people’s reliance on cars and putting jobs, schools, grocery stores and other services within easy reach of home and near transit centers.

Land in transit-rich neighborhoods is typically expensive, making it hard for affordable housing developers to compete with for-profit developers to build in these areas.  But now, thanks to the new Bay Area Transit Oriented Affordable Housing (TOAH) Fund, this will be a little easier. The fund is a $50 million collaborative public-private initiative created to encourage inclusive transit-oriented development. This groundbreaking effort will provide financing to promote the development of affordable housing, as well as critical services near public transit hubs.

The concept of the fund was developed by the Great Communities Collaborative (GCC), which TransForm coordinates.  The TOAH Fund was seeded with an initial $10 million investment from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The fund partners were able to use these local funds to leverage an additional $40 million in private capital to support equitable Transit-Oriented Development from six local community development financial institutions (CDFIs), banking institutions and local and national foundations. Now that the program has come to fruition, it will operate independently and will be managed by a consortium of six community development financial institutions led by the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF).

The fund offers a wide range of attractive financing products to developers and government entities for housing and mixed use projects near transit lines throughout the nine-county Bay Area. Borrowers can access predevelopment, acquisition, construction, mini-permanent and leveraged loans for New Markets Tax Credit transactions.

With this new equitable TOD tool available, the Collaborative will work to ensure that both efforts, the TOAH Fund and the GCC, work in harmony toward their goal of maximizing opportunities for people of all incomes to be able to live in complete communities with great transit access, public spaces, and shops to which they can walk.  Two organizations representing the GCC, Reconnecting America and the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, will sit on the Fund's Advisory Committee.

See recent news and a report from the Center for Transit-Oriented Development that lays out the need and opportunity for the strategy.

The Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco will be the first place to benefit, as the funds are helping realize a project with 153 permanent affordable units and a much-needed grocery store to replace its current use: a parking lot.

Developers interested in applying should click here for more details.

Fund Partners

• Metropolitan Transportation Commission
• Great Communities Collaborative
• Ford Foundation
• Living Cities
• San Francisco Foundation
• Citi Community Capital
• Morgan Stanley
• Corporation for Supportive Housing
• Enterprise Community Loan Fund
• Low Income Investment Fund
• Bay Area Local Initiatives Support Corporation
• Northern California Community Loan Fund
• Opportunity Fund
• Silicon Valley Community Foundation