Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, Los Angeles Local Initiatives Support Corporation
Tunua Thrash-Ntuk
Executive director at Los Angeles Local Initiatives Support Corporation
Since taking over the Los Angeles Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LA LISC) seven years ago, Tunua Thrash-Ntuk has stepped up the agency’s affordable-housing push across the region’s underserved neighborhoods.
Thrash-Ntuk was this year named one of L.A.’s Impact-Makers to Watch by consultancy Stratiscope and received the Wells Fargo Diversity, Inclusion + Equity Award presented by the Los Angeles Business Journal. In 2020, LA LISC deployed more than $150,000 of grants and loans to communities throughout Los Angeles County, which encompassed 25 percent of funds the national organization distributed across the U.S.
“At LISC LA, a lot of our work is focused on increasing the supply of housing and advocating for policies that increase the available financing to build more,” Thrash-Ntuk wrote in a May 2021 column for the advocacy organization California YIMBY. “We also have been lifting up creative opportunities to add homes to the Los Angeles landscape.”
Efforts to boost the affordable housing stock under Thrash-Ntuk have included focusing on ways to quickly add units largely through low-income housing tax credits while also preserving the character of neighborhoods. She has looked at the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act in Washington, D.C., as a model for long-term residents in multifamily developments to become a part of the ownership structure.
Under Thrash-Ntuk’s leadership, LA LISC has also sought to train more nonprofit developers to enter the affordable housing space through its Development Training Institute. The program takes a set of early career project managers working for nonprofit developers in L.A., the Bay Area and San Diego and provides them with in-depth training in the skills required to complete development projects.
Prior to joining LA LISC, Thrash-Ntuk served as executive director of the West Angeles Community Development Corporation, where she was responsible for asset management and oversight of the agency’s $150 million real estate portfolio.
An L.A. native, Thrash-Ntuk earned her bachelor’s in interdisciplinary studies from the University of California-Berkeley before earning a master’s in city planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. — A.C.
