Why I founded AHI, Part 3
Who goes to Liverpool in January?
Other than Beatles fans, of course ….
After my Edinburgh insight and then my Bird of Paradise moment, I had been seriously contemplating creating an international affordable housing finance consultancy (pages 9-11, link in .pdf) focused in impact – making positive change. The customers, therefore, had to have a public-policy orientation: governments, governmental bodies, bilaterals, foundations, policy groups, or trade associations. The services and products had to be either public (information, studies, reports) or public benefit (program innovations that would appear in the marketplace).
But, I realized, even if that were true, there were two questions I had to answer in the marketplace:
- Do housing finance ecosystems obey similar structural principles?
- Could I ‘play’ outside the US? That is, was what I knew about affordable housing useful and communicable?
“There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.” A Study in Scarlet, page 23
I was in Liverpool, along with a half-dozen other Americans and a score and a half of British, at a symposium convened by Andrea Titterington, then group CEO of Maritime Housing (now Regenda), to focus on the question, Could US-style fiscal initiatives work in Britain? After all, in AHI’s unofficial motto of the
To do that, and with the help of George Bull of Baker Tilly,
Would you trust this man with your money? I know I would!
we created the US-UK ecosystemic comparison. Eventually the group put out a Liverpool Symposium Report (link in .pdf) that led a group of us to propose a Housing And Regeneration Tax (HART) Tax Credit, modeled on the US LIHTC, that has garnered considerable stakeholder interest (link in .pdf).
“I wonder how much faster we’d have done this with tax credits?”
To date, with HART, we have seen many crucial government officials and received a strong response, but unfortunately those who have given us a strong response are not in government, and those in government have not given us a strong response …
“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
