NYC Housing Partnership Names Jamie Smarr as CEO
By Celia Young July 26, 2022 6:12 pm
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The NYC Housing Partnership tapped Jamie Smarr, formerly of the senior vice president at the NHP Foundation, to lead the nonprofit as it looks to expand its impact on New York City’s affordable housing sector.
NYC Housing Partnership works with developers to score public funding for affordable housing projects. Smarr replaces Dan Martin, who retired after 18 years in the post, according to the Housing Partnership.
“The partnership already has a four-decade track record of doing great work when it comes to affordable home ownership and affordable rental housing,” Smarr said. “I’m looking for ways to expand that. We could double our size and probably still not be able to do enough to address how much affordable and homeless housing we need to create in the city. So that’s the direction we’re going to head in.”
Smarr, who started his new gig July 18, hopes to grow the nonprofit’s staff and secure more funding for local affordable housing developers, as New York City struggles with an increasingly expensive residential rental market and a large unhoused population. Smarr is no stranger to the role: He led a similar program at NHP that provided financing, asset management and fundraising support to affordable housing initiatives across 16 states.
Before his decade at NHP, Smarr spent 11 years as the executive director of the New York City Educational Construction Fund, where he partnered with real estate developers to build 3,000 new public school seats. He got his start in city government, serving as the director of tax and zoning incentives for the New York City Housing Preservation and Development Department in the late 1990s after earning degrees in urban development and higher education administration from Harvard University and Columbia University.
“We look forward to Jamie continuing and expanding the Housing Partnership’s vital role in facilitating the creation and preservation of affordable housing in New York City,” James Hedden, chairman of the board of the Housing Partnership, said in a statement.
Celia Young can be reached at cyoung@commercialobserver.com.
