Andrew Trueblood will join the D.C. Policy Center as a Senior Advisor to its Housing Policy Initiative, to direct the development of the organization’s Cash for Covenants project.
Most recently, Andrew served as the Director of the DC Office of Planning (DCOP), where he prioritized agency efforts around housing and equity, and shepherded the update of the Comprehensive Plan and led DCOP’s support of Mayor Bowser’s housing efforts. This included a goal of 36,000 new units by 2025, with 12,000 affordable units and area-level affordable housing targets with the goal of achieving a more equitable distribution of affordable housing.
Read Andrew’s full biography here.
About the Cash for Covenants project
In 2020, the D.C. Policy Center developed a policy tool which it called Inclusionary Conversions, to quickly expand the city’s affordable housing stock at a fraction of the cost of building new housing, especially in parts of city where affordability is elusive. This proposal was adopted by the D.C. Council in the FY 2022 budget, and funded with $5 million as a pilot program dubbed “Cash 2 Covenant” by the Bowser administration in December 2021.
Building on this success, the D.C. Policy Center’s Cash for Covenants program will seek to expand this model, adapting it for funding from private sources including philanthropies, foundations, employers, and anchor institutions. By removing some requirements of traditional affordable housing mixed-finance deals, this approach promises to be a faster as well as more flexible, efficient, and scalable way to build a much-needed stock of affordable housing units across the country.
Supported by generous seed funding from Huron Philanthropies, the idea is to build a blueprint for implementing the Cash for Covenants tool at the D.C. Policy Center, which we can hand off to a national organization with a national mission.
Phase 1 of this project, which will be led by Trueblood, will focus on examining the viability of this model.
For more information on this project, please contact the D.C. Policy Center at contact@dcpolicycenter.org.