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| 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.”
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
