Maria Barry
National executive for community development banking at Bank of America
Last year's rank: 23
Maria Barry’s community development banking (CBD) team provided $7.1 billion in debt and equity financing in 2023 and financed 11,000 housing units, including 1,200 middle-income units, 1,200 units for senior citizens, 1,900 supportive units and 8,100 green units. Phew!
“We worked really closely with our clients in order to bring the deals to a close,” Barry said, giving credit to her team for a year of hard work. “It definitely required a lot of back and forth and a lot of reworking of deals, so it was very labor intensive for everyone involved. But, at the end of the day, we put out $7.1 billion and helped create 11,000 housing units for people who really need them.”
Barry also gave a nod to public-private partnerships. “We’ve seen cities and states really step up to help get deals over the finish line,” she said. “It’s really a team effort, for sure.”
A big part of Barry’s effort was expended on projects that incorporate resident services such as access to financial education, and health and well-being through programs focused on academic support, job training, family programs and food education. In 2023, Barry and her team launched a $150 million workforce housing fund with Enterprise Community Partners that will preserve 3,000 housing units for those earning between 80 and 120 percent of the area median income (AMI). Two deals in Washington, D.C., and Miami have closed via the fund so far, preserving affordable housing for nearly 500 families.
“There is a real need for middle-income housing in that 80 to 120 AMI area,” Barry said. “Because those deals, in a lot of cases, don’t have a major subsidy that goes along with that, there needs to be a partnership that works, and we developed our fund to help provide an extra layer of capital to get those deals over the finish line.”
Barry and her team financed 18 women- and minority-developed projects in total last year, including Brisa Builders, a for-profit minority- and women-owned business, for which CBD lent $170 million to construct an 11-story mixed-use building with 232 affordable housing units in Brooklyn. New York City agencies and programs provided significant subsidies for the development, which includes 70 supportive housing units for formerly homeless households.
“No matter the size, each one of these deals impacts the community that they’re in, and in each one of these deals there’s people who now have a safe place to live,” Barry said.
Affordable housing developers weren’t immune to the macroeconomic headwinds that other industries faced this past year, and Barry’s team kept busy advising clients on how to mitigate risk while maintaining their focus on creating much-needed affordable housing.
“There’s nothing like going to a groundbreaking and seeing the development come to completion,” she said. “Many times we’ll get a chance to meet some of the residents, and their lives have changed. You almost forget about all the hard work when you get to that point and just think, ‘It’s so worth it.’”
In the CMBS market, Bank of America originated $4.1 billion of loan volume in 2023 and an estimated $5.1 billion when factoring in deals where it partnered with other lenders, according to Trepp data.
