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An Innovative Solution for the Affordable Housing Crisis
Mark Ethridge ’06 is helping to dramatically increase the availability of affordable housing in Charlotte and beyond with his innovative and profitable approach.
Mark picked up his interest in real estate in Chris Martin’s English class his junior year at Country Day. “I remember the books we got to read my junior year,” he recalls. “They helped establish the way I think about the relationship between place and identity and how it can shape our lives. That intersection is something I explored in college and is a part of why real estate has always been so attractive to me as a career.”
Combining his love of history and real estate with his values of social justice, Mark went on to Princeton and studied history, particularly urban development, place and identity, and social stratification. While working in real estate finance, it occurred to him that the vast majority of people who make less than median income rent in private, unrestricted properties.
“So, I got really curious about what folks were doing to maintain affordability at these properties,” he says. He made a database of every apartment complex in Charlotte that was built before 1990, including who owned it, how much they bought it for, and what they were charging for rent. The database soon had more than 20,000 units worth of housing within a few miles of downtown.
“Lo and behold, what I found was these properties were slowly changing hands,” Mark shares in his interview with Fast Company, which recently profiled his success and innovation. Private equity firms, often from outside Charlotte, were behind many of the sales. From years inside the business, he knew this would likely lead to displacement.
But Mark had an unusual solution: he wanted to buy properties, fix them up, and keep the rents affordable through a 20-year deed restriction that places legal rules on how the property can be used and priced. They’d provide a slow and reliable return, with the added benefit of helping to combat the city’s affordable housing shortage.
After some small successes, Mark and his firm Ascent Real Estate Capital (founded by Jon Dixon ’98) connected with former Country Day trustees Erskine Bowles and Nelson Schwab, along with a group of mostly local organizations. Together, they created the Housing Impact Fund, dedicated specifically to buying properties with affordable rents and preserving them as affordable housing.
Key to making the fund work, Erskine says, is Mark Ethridge. “While he’s got a heart as big as this room I’m sitting in, and a desire to do the right thing, and a belief in helping these people that need the help, he’s also realistic, practical, and effective,” he says. “I think he’s truly an extraordinary person.”
Mark sees the work as simply meeting a need that wasn’t being met by the old way of building affordable housing. “Altruism and philanthropy can’t be the only venue for us to solve our problems,” he says. “We need all the financial discipline, all the entrepreneurship, all the expertise the private sector can bring and find a way to do altruistic things. We think this is a healthy balance of that.”
To learn more about the Housing Impact Fund, visit charlottecountryday. org/MarkEthridge.
This story includes excerpts from “Charlotte may have cracked the code on affordable housing. Here’s how,” published in Fast Company, January 25, 2021.
