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."
- EAH Housing CEO Mary Murtaugh at one of her company's affordable properties.
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.
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| Groundbreaking for EAH housing built affordable apartments in Hawaii. |
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
Read more:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/31/MNQ81NNOCV.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1qud1IXtU
