Rhode Island native and ardent Pawtucket PawSox fan Brenda Clement had some big shoes to fill in her new role as executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA). Her predecessor, Aaron Gornstein, held the role for more than 20 years before leaving earlier this year to take up a post as head housing honcho for the commonwealth.

But Clement is used to trail blazing – she helped found several affordable housing organizations in the Ocean State, and most recently led Housing Action, the statewide umbrella group of housing and community development organizations for Rhode Island, as well as taking a leading role in the New England Housing Network.

Brenda Clement

Title: Executive Director, Citizens Housing and Planning Association; Boston
Age: 49
Experience: 22 years in affordable housing, two months at CHAPA

Tell me a bit about how you got into housing policy. Was it a lifelong interest?

Actually, it all started at a neighborhood clean-up – I was then president of a group called Pride In Pawtucket, and we were doing an Earth Day clean-up with some kids from my church’s youth group. The neighborhood was not too too far from our church, and we were picking up trash and discovered a car [in an empty lot]. We walked over, and in the front seat of the car there were clothes and food and it was clear somebody had been living there pretty recently – and worse yet, when we looked in the back seat, there were toys. It was one of those “A-ha” moments in your life where all of a sudden an issue like housing and homelessness wasn’t a big-city issue, a New York issue, a Boston issue – it was my issue, because it was happening in my community…We [thought] well, what can we do, our little church? So I had two things, my mother and a phone – you’ve never met my mother, but those were two pretty good things to have. So we sat at our dining room table one day and said, “Alright, what can we do?” And got on the phone…from that we created a little housing non-profit and bought some property and ultimately figured out how to renovate that and rent that out, and we eventually bought another piece of property for seniors….it was from that small start that I found myself now leading one of the premier housing organizations in the country. It’s been an interesting journey. And not yet done.

Obviously one of the things that’s most occupied the person in your chair the past few years has been the foreclosure crisis. As you’re taking on this new role, where do you think we are with that? What are your priorities?

As we all know, the first wave of foreclosures were fueled by subprime lending, and the wave we’re now in is fueled by people losing their jobs. The goal is always to help people attain, maintain and retain housing over the long term. So working on programs that help people stay in their homes as much as possible, and for those who are going to have to go through foreclosure, to help them transition into new housing. We want to keep roofs over everybody’s head.

It seemed like when the foreclosures first started happening, everybody was worried about urban blight, and there was a lot of focus on CDCs and other non-profits being able to buy an rehab abandoned property. But it seems like that’s proved harder than people thought it would be.

We do need tools to deal with abandoned properties that are already there and bring those back up to a useful purpose. But you want to try as much as possible to stop the bleeding, and prevent [people from losing their homes in the first place]. One thing that’s clear from the gridlock in Congress is that we can’t count on more [Neighborhood Stabilization Program] money or other funds coming down the pike to address vacant and abandoned buildings. So I think the focus has got to be on trying to keep more and more people in their homes.

Clement’s Top Five Reasons Why It’s More Fun to Watch The PawSox Than The Red Sox:

1. McCoy Stadium
2. Cheap tickets
3. Good food
4. “The players work their butts off.”
5. “You get to see baseball the way it was meant to be played.”