CEO of affordable housing nonprofit cherishes beating the odds

EAH Housing CEO Mary Murtagh

In an industry in which five out of every six projects never get off the ground, Mary Murtagh still loves her job and can laugh about it.

“Affordable housing is Murphy’s Law incarnate,” says Ms. Murtagh, who has been with the affordable housing organization EAH Housing for over twenty five years. “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Mary Murtagh on the balcony of one of EAH’s affordable apartments.

 

As its president and CEO, Ms. Murtagh is the force behind EAH, which has built or renovated nearly 1,400 units of housing in the North Bay, and over 5,000 total in 12 counties and two states- California and Hawaii during her tenure with the San Rafael-based nonprofit. The agency is Marin County’s largest affordable builder, and second-largest in the North Bay to Burbank Housing.

The nonprofit EAH used to be known as Ecumenical Association for Housing, owing to its faith-based roots. The company employs about 350 people, the majority of whom work in Marin County.

Ms. Murtagh grew up in rural New Hampshire, near Dartmouth College. She’s a self-described former hippie, who now loves to build infill developments that are good for the environment. She has an undergraduate degree in art history and philosophy from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and a master’s in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those degrees, she said, did not prepare her for what she would encounter at a job with the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency where she grew interested in real estate development – specifically finance.

“Up until then you can kind of picture me as a totally naive rube wandering around with my mouth open,” she said. “The first time I went to New York though, I thought the whole thing was a terrible mistake and a terrible thing to do to the planet. And when I finally started studying real estate finance, it suddenly all became clear … I started to understand the city and urban economics.”

In Los Angeles, Ms. Murtagh became what she says was the translator between the real estate office at the Redevelopment Agency and the Office of Housing and Urban Development in Washington. And when the first grant she ever wrote – to expand a Pep Boys in inner city Los Angeles – was funded, Ms. Murtagh said she felt like she was empowered to effect change.

Ms. Murtagh moved to San Francisco in 1984 and worked for a political consulting and market research company. While there she helped orchestrate the approvals for the renovation of the Arlington Hotel, a residence for recovering alcoholics still viewed as a model development in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

In 1986, she was hired to direct EAH, an affordable housing organization that at that time was licking its wounds from two money-losing projects and considering getting out of the building business altogether.

EAH Housing CEO Mary Murtagh celebrates the opening of the largest affordable housing solar installation in the nation.

“Obviously, that was a serious issue but I said to them, ‘If you don’t want to build anything, don’t hire me. That would be a mistake for both of us because I love to build things,'” she said. “The smell of sawdust is what makes my day. That and curing concrete.”

Ms. Murtagh set out to make her first big project at the head of the organization a success. She negotiated for two acres on Corte Madera Creek and you can hear the pride in her voice today when she talks about it.

She said 760 people applied for residency in the 28-unit development that turned out “beautifully.”

“Opponents compared it to the Exxon Valdez during the hearings,” she laughs. “And I was getting my feet wet and finding out what opposition meant in Marin County.”

Setbacks are a fact of life when it comes to building almost any kind of housing, including affordable units.

“You have five deals fall through for every one that ever sticks. Maybe more,” she says. “I don’t try and think about that ratio. It’s too discouraging.”

She said in her over 20 years with EAH, affordable housing hasn’t gotten any easier. Getting the approvals is still just as difficult. Opposition is as vocal, if not more. Funding is hard to coordinate and unexpected things change.

CEO Mary Murtagh accepts an award on behalf of EAH Housing.

And just when she says she feels like she’s “trying to sweep the ocean back with a broom,” something encouraging will happen, like the passage Proposition 1C, which opened up $2.9 billion for affordable housing.

Ms. Murtagh said her future attention will be on continuing to strive for a permanent state funding source and more partnerships with private developers.

How EAH housing helped one woman reduce her commute by 90 minutes

Moving to Centertown affordable apartments by EAH Housing allowed Anelyn to reduce her commute to a 2 minute walk.

Anelyn Gallego, a mother of four grown children, emigrated from the Philippines when she was 15 years old and has since lived in the Bay Area for over 35 years. She currently lives at San Clemente Place, an affordable apartment complex in Corte Madera managed by EAH Housing, with one of her daughters.
Anelyn works for the California Highway Patrol (CHP) in Corte Madera as an office assistant, and her daughter is a preschool teacher in Novato. Anelyn’s current commute is a two-minute walk to the CHP office down the street.
But Anelyn’s commute wasn’t always so short. Until last fall she was living in Fairfield in Solano County and her commute into Marin would sometimes take three hours round-trip. To avoid the worst of the traffic, she would often take evening organ lessons at her church in Novato, returning home at a much later hour.
When the long commutes became unbearable, Anelyn started looking for a home closer to her job with the CHP. She spent a great deal of time looking for an apartment she could afford in Corte Madera with no success.
“This is a very affluent area; I never thought I would be able to afford to live here.”
She then applied for an apartment at San Clemente Place and was accepted. “I am so grateful to be able to live here. The Lord answered my prayers, giving us an affordable, quiet and safe place to live.”
Moving to San Clemente Place has also drastically reduced her carbon footprint.
“The best thing about living here is being close to my job. I’m just two doors down the street and I can walk to work. I don’t have to pay for gas much anymore, because I walk everywhere. I’m walking distance from the supermarket, my gym, restaurants; everything is convenient.”
But she does understand that there are many more like her who need an affordable place to live near their job. “It would be really nice if there were more affordable homes here so people don’t have to drive so far.”

EAH Housing announces Shelter Hill is going green

Shelter Hill received extensive green upgrades and energy retrofits by EAH Housing.

Affordable housing is going green as solar retrofitting and other efficient technologies are being utilized in the refurbishing of a complex in Mill Valley managed by EAH Housing. Shelter Hill, a 75-unit housing complex, is going solar starting this month. The solar installation will provide predictable energy bills and reduce the utility costs paid by the residents each month.
The complex, which hosts four four-bedroom, 40 three-bedroom and 27 two-bedroom apartments, also includes a community room with a kitchen, a computer learning center and outdoor play areas for kids.
Of the 275 to 300 residents who call Shelter Hills home, many are lower income or living on fixed incomes. Reducing the ever rising energy costs will provide a welcome reduction of out of pocketing heating, cooling and electrical costs, EAH officials said.
Built in 1975 and in need of a redo both aesthetically and to bring the property up to modern standards, the planned greening of the complex was something EAH was very interested in.
“It is a mission of our company. We want to make the units green as we can as well as the common areas as it benefits everybody,” EAH project manager Dave Egan said.
The upgrades will include a new solar electricity system, which will be installed by Berkeley’s Sun Light & Power. It is made up of 138 Trina 280W solar modules on the roofs of the buildings.
The cost of green rehab pays for itself in utility savings while reducing energy usage by 25 percent for the entire property. Each unit will be installed with hydronic heating and cooling systems, energy efficient double glazed windows, low flow water usage toilets and new refrigerators.
Sun Light & Power has installed solar electricity as well as solar hot water systems at other EAH Housing communities. The company recently completed its largest affordable housing solar installation Crescent Park in Richmond.
“Shelter Hill was a property built in the mid 1970s in southern Marin. It has been operating as affordable housing ever since. Now it is time to refresh the property to bring it up to modern standard,” Egan said.
The property will also be getting other upgrades as part of the redo which will consist of the installation of energy efficient appliances, high-efficiency water heaters, dual-pane windows, water-saving fixtures and native-plant landscaping. Over half of EAH properties have been retrofitted with green technologies and the other half have received energy use audits.

This article originally appeared in the Mill Valley Herald.

Low income housing residents win college scholarships from EAH housing.

Nonprofit affordable housing developer, manager and advocate EAH Housing awarded $30,000 in scholarships to 12 of its residents for use in the 2014-15 school year. Each scholarship recipient will receive $2,500. Recipients hail from Hawaii and several cities in California: Turlock, Richmond, San Jose, Union City, Mill Valley, St. Helena and Fresno.
“These students have shown an incredible dedication to higher education and we recognize their potential to change the world around them,” said EAH Housing President and CEO Mary Murtagh. “EAH Housing believes in building communities and investing in the future.”
Launched in 2012, the EAH Housing Scholarship Fund supports students pursuing higher education and helps defray the rising costs of tuition, textbooks and academic supplies. It was created through generous contributions from late affordable housing advocate Rebecca Wood Watkin, EAH Housing Board of Directors, numerous EAH staff and individual donors.
The Scholarship Fund has previously awarded 20 students. Recipients of the scholarship receive annual awards throughout the course of their college education, contingent on academic performance.
The schools recipients plan to attend include University of Hawaii at Manoa; Oregon State University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Davis; Heald College; De Anza College; Ohio State University; Contra Costa College; Modesto Junior College; Leeward Community College and California State University, Fresno. The recipients are pursuing degrees in Administrative Justice, Biology, Nursing, Agricultural Sciences, Business and Criminology.
Scholarship recipients for the 2014-2015 academic year are:
•        Edgar Baculi, Fresno, CA
•        Sierra Ceja, Turlock, CA
•        Francisco Chavez, Fresno, CA
•        Halia Dawkins, Mill Valley, CA
•        Elizabeth Esquival, San Jose, CA
•        Anahy Hernandez, St. Helena, CA
•        Sabrina Kohgadai, Union City, CA
•        Celine Truong, Honolulu, HI
•        Lexis Onizuka, Mililani, HI
•        Teioni Porter, Richmond, CA
•        Isis Usborns, Mililani, HI
•        Ting Ting Wu, Honolulu, HI
“Encouraging the educational aspirations of curious young minds is the key to unlocking a prosperous future,” said Kevin Carney, EAH Housing Vice President – Hawaii. “EAH Housing believes in supporting our keiki by encouraging them to set their sights on the horizon and actively pursue their goals.”
“We know the EAH Housing Scholarship Fund will bring big benefits for these students, their families, and their communities,” said EAH Housing CFO Cathy Macy.

SF Chronicle Profile: EAH Housing CEO Mary Murtaugh

 

EAH Housing CEO Mary Murtaugh.

A Passion to Promote Low-Income Housing
This article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle

An impish grin spread across Mary Murtagh’s face as she drove her silver Prius down Magnolia Avenue, just past downtown Larkspur. “See if you can guess where the affordable housing is,” she said. “Look, there’s a beautiful complex over there, two beautiful complexes on the right, a historic red-brick winery on the left.”

Edgewater Place – the first project Murtagh shepherded after taking the reins of San Rafael affordable developer EAH Housing a quarter-century ago – was one of those complexes, a cluster of attractive garden-style apartment buildings nestled among flowering pear trees alongside Corte Madera Creek. With charm, persistence, grit and “a lot of good Irish luck,” Murtagh, 65, has devoted her career to building low-income housing throughout California and Hawaii that defies expectations.

A gift of gab, a knack for navigating red tape and a passion for social justice underlie her success in dealing with Byzantine regulations, massively complex funding sources and NIMBYism.

Dingy Apartments

As a graduate student in architecture at MIT, Murtagh spent a semester working at an old-school housing project, a hulking structure where the dingy apartments had cinderblock walls and the elevators were broken or filthy. “I had expected a gracious class, perched at a desk, drawing plans, and we ended up swinging hammers and hanging out with residents at the worst public housing development in Boston,” she said. “They were great people – smart, capable, tough – and they were

trapped in this hideous environment because it was all they could afford. People were being robbed and held up regularly.

“I had an insight that there had to be a better way to help people through housing than to put them in these God-awful places.”

83 properties

That epiphany has carried her through a career over seeing the building of more than 6,800 units of affordable housing at 83 properties in California and Hawaii. EAH generally rents to people making between 30 and 60 percent of area median income. In Alameda County, for instance, that’s $93,500 a year for a family of four. A family making $28,050 (30 percent of

median income) might pay $550 a month for a two-bedroom apartment at EAH’s Camellia Place in Dublin, while a family making $56,100 (60 percent) might pay $1,131 for a similar two-bedroom. All its properties have multiyear waiting lists. New complexes get deluged with applicants and hold lotteries to select residents. “It’s a hand up, not a hand out,” Murtagh said. “Everyone in our buildings pays rent, and everyone is working unless they’re disabled or retired.” Some 20,000 residents – families, seniors, students, people with disabilities – now have roofs over their heads thanks to EAH. “But we’re still sweeping the ocean back with a broom compared to what the need is,” she said.

Murtagh grew up in small-town Hanover, N.H., home of Dartmouth College, where her doctor dad taught medicine and her homemaker mom, a former social worker, acted in the theater troupe. “I had a wonderful childhood running around and falling out of trees, putting dams across streams, taking cows to pasture in front of our house, hiking and skiing,” she said.

’60s idealism

At elite all-women’s Wellesley College, she majored in philosophy and art history. It was a heady time, as previously sheltered young women discovered feminism, civil rights and the antiwar movement, said Priscilla Heilveil, a close friend from those days. “I don’t think ‘Murt’ has ever lost her ’60s idealism,” Heilveil said. “She’s very gifted and could have made

a fortune as an architect, but her passion is social justice.”

As seniors, Murtagh and friends wanted a student speaker at graduation to offset the conservative senator slated to talk. The college president refused, so they “said the hell with this,” Murtagh recalled, and organized a protest until the administration capitulated. Picking the speaker was easy: The class of 1969 had a megastar named Hillary Rodham.

“Everyone on campus knew her,” Murtagh said. “She was super smart, very engaging and involved in government issues even then.”

White House reunions

The future secretary of state “gave a real barn burner” of a speech, landing her photo in Life magazine. As first lady, she hosted class reunions at the White House. Murtagh went on to MIT, where she had the fateful encounter with public housing.

After grad school, she worked for the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency on inner-city job creation programs, showing a talent for landing federal grants. She studied real estate financing at UCLA and became fascinated with the idea of being a developer, even though the only ones she knew “were white guys with matching ties, briefcases and calculators.”

She moved to the Bay Area in the early 1980s with her future husband, biochemist Fred Jacobson. They

now live in Berkeley and have two sons. Adam, 22, is a computer science major at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.; Aaron, 17, is a junior at Berkeley High.

Nonstop careers

Jacobson, she said, is “hot on the trail of a new drug for breast cancer” at Genentech. Their dual nonstop careers can make for a harried home life. “Let’s not talk about the state of housekeeping at my house,” she

said.

In Murtagh’s first Bay Area job, she worked with St. Vincent De Paul and the San Francisco Department of

Public Health to acquire and rehab a Tenderloin hotel to house recovering alcoholics. “Mary is a small Irish lass who is like a pit bull when she gets onto something,” said Mark Buell, a philanthropist and Democratic fundraiser who was her boss on that project, and later served on EAH’s board for a decade. “She leaves no stone unturned. She will use every contact she has any time there’s a hint of change in the very complex rules around affordable housing.”

In 1986 she started as head of EAH, then a small struggling nonprofit crammed into an office behind a

San Rafael church. Nationwide, funds for affordable housing, ravaged by cuts under former presidents Richard Nixon and

Ronald Reagan, were at a nadir. But that year saw the introduction of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which gives companies big tax write-offs for investing in affordable rental complexes. “All of a sudden – poof! bada bing! – there was a huge, flexible funding source,” she said. “It was the biggest expansion in affordable housing that had ever happened.”

Her first coup was sweet-talking a developer into selling the Larkspur land for Edgewater Place at a huge discount for the tax break. Edgewater received its planning permits in May 1989 – the night before her first son was born.

Tax exemption

Early on, she successfully lobbied for California legislation that gave a property tax exemption to the owners of housing for families making below 80 percent of area median income. That provided an ongoing financial boost for developers of affordable complexes.

Murtagh soon realized that EAH should expand beyond the “stony ground” of development-averse Marin. As she worked to build affordable complexes throughout the state and later Hawaii, she spearheaded the inclusion of quality-of-life amenities such as after-school tutoring, GED programs and tax-preparation assistance. She pioneered computer learning centers, something that’s now commonplace. “Mary is visionary,” said Amie Fishman, executive director of the East Bay Housing Organizations. “She pushes ideas before they’re popularized, and only later do they become the obvious thing.”

She was an early proponent of green building. In 2005, EAH put enough solar panels on Richmond’s 378-unit Crescent Park complex to generate almost a megawatt of electricity, then the largest such installation on affordable housing anywhere. “Solar now is on everything we do,” she said.

Dense housing

She’s also an advocate of dense housing located near jobs and transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Her newest passion project is a college scholarship fund for EAH residents created this year. “We have so many worthy kids who deserve to go to college and don’t have the money,” she said.

“Against a strong headwind of opposition that always arises around individual projects, she has been able to maintain for decades a sense of optimism and purpose,” said Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey. He recalled a project at Point Reyes Station that neighbors resisted. “Mary and her team stepped back from the idea on the table, pulled out a clean sheet of paper and said, ‘OK, let’s talk about what you want to see in affordable housing here.’ She opened it up and had a community advisory vote. In the end, there was substantial support for the project.”

Now, as affordable housing faces the worst financial climate in decades, Murtagh “is helping to identify the next generation of funding opportunities,” he said. California’s elimination of redevelopment agencies slashes about $1 billion a year from affordable housing construction. Creating a double whammy, state bond-backed subsidies for affordable housing expired

about 18 months ago. EAH brings in two-thirds of its revenue managing complexes – about 330 of its 400 employees are involved in on-site work – so it will survive, but new construction of desperately needed housing is likely to grind to a halt.

Recording fee

Housing advocates back SB1220, which would impose a $75 recording fee on real estate documents, generating around $700 million a year for affordable housing. The California Association of Realtors opposes the bill on the grounds it increases the cost of buying a home.

“So many people erroneously think the foreclosure crisis solved the housing crisis,” Murtagh said. “Even at their discounted rates, foreclosed-upon houses are beyond the reach of people in the income ranges we

serve.”

Darlene “Dollie” Moore, 73, a resident of EAH’s Rodeo Gateway senior housing, exemplifies that. Retired from her electronics quality-assurance job, she lives on about $1,000 a month from Social Security. She pays $227 a month for a modest one-bedroom apartment and enjoys the “wonderful people,” Bingo games, computer room and proximity to stores.

“This was just God’s blessing,” she said. “Otherwise, I would never have been able to live in the Bay Area near my grandchildren, who are the light of my life.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

csaid@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page A – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/31/MNQ81NNOCV.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1qud1IXtU