HAND members are hard at work addressing the growing housing affordability challenge across the Capital Region. Five Minutes With is a series highlighting these individuals and organizations within our membership. This informal conversation asks HAND members about their recent projects, the affordable housing industry and more. In the latest edition, we chat with Anne Venezia, Arlington County’s new Housing Director.

In my new role, I also look forward to further collaborating with organizations like HAND and MWCOG to share ideas and problem solve. The need for new approaches at a regional level has never been greater.

Ms. Venezia brings more than 20 years of experience in housing policy and finance.Combined with her deep knowledge of Arlington and strong interpersonal skills, she was the top candidate in a national search. In her new role, Ms. Venezia will direct the Housing Division’s portfolio of financial and development programs and services.

She most recently served six months as the Acting Housing Director and was the Housing Finance Manager for four years prior. Venezia joined Arlington County in 2008 and gained experience delivering strategic financial planning, asset management, multifamily development and acquisitions, and housing policy oversight. Check out our conversation below:

HAND: You have extensive experience in the housing/community development industry – can you tell us about the journey you’ve taken to get to this point?
AV: I started my career in consulting, working on housing policy and disaster recovery at two different firms before entering the public sector. I accepted a position with the Development team in Arlington County’s Housing Division in 2008, underwriting loans to support acquisitions of new affordable units and ramping up my housing finance skills in the process. Following a re-org in 2016, I moved to a newly created Finance and Asset Management team. While managing this team, I oversaw an annual budget of $30 million for housing programs (largely multifamily development) as well as asset management and compliance functions of the County’s more than 8,000 committed affordable units, nearly $400 million in multifamily development loans, and over 200 single-family loans. While much of my background has been on the finance and data side of housing, working directly with families benefitting from these programs — whether in disaster ravaged neighborhoods or onsite at one of the County’s affordable properties — has always had the greatest impression on me, and is a reminder of how important our affordable housing work is to support these households.

HAND: Can you tell us about your latest role? How are you dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 simultaneously?
AV: I served as Acting Housing Director from November 2019 until April 2020 and was offered the permanent Housing Director position at the end of April. Coming into this role during a national pandemic has its challenges – we’re balancing existing programs with new COVID-related relief programs, all while learning new technologies that enable remote work and virtual community engagement. Thankfully, we have a dedicated and hardworking staff that has surpassed expectations in meeting these new demands and we’re looking for opportunities to improve our service delivery that can continue into a post-COVID world.

HAND: What is the most important takeaway(s) from your experience thus far that you’re bringing into your new role?
AV: While metrics can be powerful in demonstrating how impactful a housing program is (or not), the people we’re helping through our programs need to be our central focus. Especially in this new COVID reality—when households are struggling more than ever to pay for basic expenses such as housing, food, and medical care—we need to constantly re-evaluate how we can help and anticipate emerging needs. And, as budgets tighten, evaluating which programs can serve the greatest needs will allow us to support as many households as possible.

HAND: What do you think is the largest hurdle when it comes to creating and preserving affordable housing across our region
AV: While there are many challenges to affordable housing in our region, limited supply and housing types are major drivers of these constraints. Even in the era of COVID, growth continues in our region; having a limited supply of affordable housing types drives up demand and prices for the limited options that do exist. There simply aren’t enough rental options in our region to meet demand, particularly for those households earning less than 60% of area median income (AMI). This results in public sector subsidies being the primary, if not only way for households earning <60% of AMI, to live in Arlington and other high-cost areas of our region.

Further exacerbating the problem is high land values in our region, which disincentivizes production of affordable housing types on these parcels. Land owners wish to maximize returns on their properties; often it’s not economical to build smaller and potentially more affordable housing types, rental or homeownership. Instead, the housing types built on these expensive parcels often are out of reach for most low and moderate-income renters and homeowners.

The good news is we’re in an economically strong region, which can provide us with the resources needed to address these supply challenges.

HAND: What are you most looking forward to over the coming months?
AV: The saying “innovation loves a crisis” gives me hope during this unprecedented time. As a County, we’re challenging ourselves to try new approaches to continue service delivery while staff is largely remote. While we’re faced daily with the devastation of COVID on our low-income communities, these challenges are sparking creativity in our otherwise daily tasks – how can we serve 10 households with a program that typically serves 8? Is it time to resurrect programs that appeared unnecessary years ago but now are relevant again? Can we rethink opportunities for housing affordability in the face of tightening budgets?

Larger economic changes, while challenging to those markets, also may present opportunities for affordable housing. As the real estate market changes due to an increase in remote work, New York City and other urban areas see increased office vacancies as opportunities to re-purpose these spaces for affordable housing. These types of approaches could introduce new options in the DC area as well.

In my new role, I also look forward to further collaborating with organizations like HAND and MWCOG to share ideas and problem solve. The need for new approaches at a regional level has never been greater.

HAND: Do you believe there is a “secret sauce” to addressing housing affordability? If so, what do you think that is?
AV: Affordable housing challenges are complex – there isn’t a single solution that can fully meet the need. However, a multi-pronged approach could go a long way in addressing these challenges:

• Increased supply and housing types. To meet the needs of our most vulnerable households, we need to diversify our housing stock to enable more types at a range of affordability levels. This includes reevaluating regulations that inhibit supply goals and limit affordable housing types.
• Regional collaboration. As I shared earlier, organizations such as HAND and MWCOG enable our ability to share ideas and resources. Approaching affordability challenges more holistically will position us to provide greater options across the region.
• Participation across sectors. This entails consistent and visible support from public agencies as well as resources and ideas from the private and nonprofit sectors. No one sector can solve the affordable housing challenge alone – everyone needs to work together to leverage our skills and resources.
• Taking risks and trying new things. Addressing the many challenges to affordable housing requires a multi-faceted approach of traditional tools and new solutions. We need to be comfortable with trying things that maybe don’t work as intended and keep trying until an effective formula emerges. And, since affordable housing is part of a constantly evolving economy, we must always revisit our formula; solutions that work today may work differently as job and real estate markets change.

HAND: If you weren’t working in this industry, what might you be doing?
AV: Writing novels in a far-away mountain cabin. My family probably wouldn’t join me in a remote location, however, so I’d probably need to settle for writing in an inspired place closer to Arlington. 😊

Most of our current laws, regulations, policies and practices in areas like housing, health-care, education and law enforcement were established, or justified, in part because of assumptions about what is normal, appropriate or desirable. These assumptions tend to reflect dominant cultural narratives or norms – for example, what constitutes a “family,” who is dangerous, which groups are deserving of societal support and which are not, etc. Over time, the consequence of laws, regulations, policies and practices is a multigenerational system of inequity. This system reinforces stereotypes and access to organizational and system power. When these assumptions are codified into laws, system policies and organizational and community practices, they are part of what creates persistent advantages for some groups and persistent disadvantages for others.

 

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue.

 

Last week, HAND’s cohort of 120 members & partners explored this topic further during the third installment of Red Lines, White Papers, & Blue Prints: A Four-Part Learning Series Exploring the Dimensions of Racism and Strategies Towards Racial Equity on White Privilege. This thought-provoking webcast built on the foundation of the second portion of the series (Implicit Bias), and we were pleased to welcome Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D. (Author, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism) as the featured speaker. Many thanks to all who joined! Hear more thoughts directly from Dr. DiAngelo below.

 

Thank you to our series sponsors, DC Housing Finance Agency, Kaiser Permanente, Wells Fargo and Meyer Foundation!

 

NOTEWORTHY REMARKS FROM DR. ROBIN DIANGELO

On racism as the status quo:

“The status quo of our society is racism. That’s the status quo. That is the norm. That is not an aberration. Racism is not an aberration. It is the norm 24 – 7 – 365 – all of our institutions effectively and efficiently reproduce and maintain racial inequality, and I as a white person move through a society in which racism and racial inequality is the norm. I move through that society in racial comfort 24 – 7. It is rare for me to be outside my racial comfort zone and most of my life I’ve been working not to go outside my racial comfort zone. So I can easily avoid experiencing racial discomfort. So we are not going to get where we need to go from a place of white comfort. The key is what we do with our discomfort. And we can certainly use it as a way out.”

 

On anti-blackness:

“So I want to be really clear – all peoples who are not perceived or defined as white, experience racism in this country and in any Western-oriented colonial settler environment. And they experience it in ways that are shared that they would relate to with one another. They also experience in ways that are very specific and particular to their group…and having said that, at this point in my work, I feel very clear about the following: there is something profoundly anti-black in this culture. And in the white mind, black people are the ultimate racial ‘other.’ There are two poles, white is on one end and black is on the other. And where you are positioned along that pole or continuum, that positioning shapes how you experience your racialization, and anti-blackness runs across that entire continuum. Even black people have received the messages of anti-blackness. Right? Sometimes this is called colorism. So the darker you are, the more compounded is the oppression.”

 

On the institution of racism:

“So, I’m going to give you just one glance at the trajectory of anti-blackness from the beginning of this country to the current time…It begins with kidnapping and 300 plus years of enslavement, torture, rape and brutality. And it carries on… you see bans on testifying against whites, which made it technically legal to murder black people in this country. And you are now in my lifetime… this has nothing to do with whether my ancestors owned enslaved Africans…we’re at employment discrimination. And now we’re at 2020 with copious empirical evidence…employment discrimination, educational discrimination, biased laws and policing, white flight, subprime mortgages, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, disproportionate special education, referrals and punishments, testing, tracking, school funding, biased media, voter suppression, cultural mockery, historical emissions, unaddressed trauma and so on. It is a system. It is the system we’re in. Nobody was, and nobody could be exempt from this system. And this system is not interrupted by smiling. The system is not interrupted by good intentions and friendliness. Only strategic, intentional antiracist action can interrupt the system. And African Americans are not, and have never been in a position to do this to the entire white collective. But the white collective has always been in a position to do this to the entire African American collective or black collective, and to benefit from the outcome of doing this. So there is no such thing as reverse racism. I do not use these terms interchangeably. I reserve the term racism to describe an action that is backed with this kind of institutional power in history.”

 

On racism as a worldview:

“So I’m going to be really blunt right now. As a result of being raised as a white person in this society, I have a racist worldview. There’s no way I could not have absorbed a racist worldview because it’s infused in everything. And as a result, I have developed racist frameworks of understanding and I have developed racist patterns of engagement. I also have investments in racism, because it’s comfortable, It has served me, it has absolutely helped me navigate the struggles I have faced – because I’m not saying white people don’t suffer or face struggles, but we don’t face that one, and not facing that one helps us navigate the ones we do face. So I am the least trustworthy to assess how well I’m doing given my investments in the status quo of racism. Now, I did not choose to be socialized that way. I would never have chosen to be socialized that way. But I wasn’t given a choice. So I sincerely do not struggle with guilt. And I’m not trying to invoke guilt. It’s a natural part of the process of coming to awareness about this as a white person, but we’ve got to move through it or it just functions to hold everything up…I don’t feel guilt about this, but I do feel something, and that is responsible. I feel responsible for the outcome of having been conditioned into racism that I have ownership of. And it’s actually incredibly liberating, transformative, to just start from the assumption that of course, you have internalized all of this, have patterns of engagements, have investments in the status quo of racism, and then you can just stop defending, deflecting, denying, and just get to work trying to figure out how that conditioning is manifesting in your life, work and relationships.”

 

On the feeling of hopelessness:

“Yes, I feel hopeless at times…it’s like it serves me as a white person to be hopeless. Because what do I want to do when I feel hopeless? Give up. And then great, the status quo continues on and I benefit from it. So I don’t get to go there. I have to push through that and keep struggling.”

 

On how to start addressing white privilege:

“What do I do? I have a response that is a challenge… If you’re white and that’s your question right now, my question back to you is, ‘How have you managed to be a fully functioning professional adult in some form of leadership and not know what to do about racism? How have you managed not to know when the information is everywhere, when they’ve been telling us forever, when anything I have the remotest interest in finding out more about, what would I do? Google it.’ I’m trying to challenge that this is some kind of neutral thing that we are innocent and we just don’t know. I actually think there’s a willful not knowing that it takes actual energy and navigation to push away. So that’s my challenge to that question, but it’s also sincere… If you’re white and just take out a piece of paper and start writing down why you don’t know what to do, you will actually have your map. Nothing on it will be quick or easy, but everything on that list you can address. Number one: I wasn’t educated on racism. Well, we know what to do there. Number two: I don’t talk about race with the white people in my life. Okay. Number three: I don’t talk about race with people of color in my life. Number four: I don’t have people of color in my life. Number five: I haven’t really cared enough to find out. Number six: I don’t want to feel guilty. Whatever is on your list. There it is. Get to work. You can do it.”