Eleanor White
Title: President and CEO, Housing Partners Inc.
Age: 67
Experience: 46 years
Eleanor White has been involved in affordable housing reform since the 1960s, helping lead the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency for over a decade before starting her own consulting firm, Housing Partners, in 1995. She recently returned to Boston after a stint in Oslo, where her husband was U.S. Ambassador to Norway, and has a fresh perspective on the state of the city’s housing needs.
Q: Tell me a little bit about your background – were you always drawn to housing issues?
A: It’s a very non-inspiring story, in a sense. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, really the only racially integrated area of Chicago – my high school when I went to it was 90 percent African American, 10 percent Jewish. So I think by osmosis I was interested in how cities work. I came to Boston to go to Radcliffe/Harvard. Probably if I had gone five or 10 years later, I would have gone on to business school. But girls didn’t go to business school back then.
I got married immediately after graduating, and my husband and I ended up in Washington, where he was working for the surgeon general. I was pounding the pavement looking for a job, and the only one I could find that didn’t require me to take a typing test was at the Federal Housing Administration. We came back to Boston two years later, [and a few months after that] I got a call from my old boss, who said, HUD is setting up a new regional office in Boston, and we’d like you to come for it. And the rest is history.
Q: Out of all the projects you’ve worked on, were there any that stand out? Gave you the most gray hairs? Or were the most satisfying to complete
A: Well, I’ve got a lot of gray hairs, as you can see! I think the two that stand out as the most satisfying were the transformation of Colombia Point into Harbor Point and the Granite Properties in Roxbury.
When [my former boss] and I arrived at MassHousing in 1983, they were in HUD foreclosure. This housing was the worst that you could imagine, and Roxbury was not in good shape in those years. These buildings had doors that didn’t lock, rat infestation, no heat in some cases, broken windows, drug dealers – it was horrible. Shortly after we got to MassHousing, we were approached by a group of nonprofits asking us to try to take over HUD’s role, and then handle the transition into new ownership.
To make a long story short – because it took three years – HUD finally agreed to turn them over, which was a huge deal, because they’d never done this. Barney Frank was huge help in getting them to agree to it. And then that started a process, where we [created] an inner-city task force, which I chaired, that brought together in Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods, the property owners, police, social service agencies, labor unions, health organizations – you name it, everybody was in the room.
By the time we left MassHousing, it still wasn’t completely done. But you drive around Roxbury today, look for the buildings with black window frames – those are some of the former Granite Properties. And they’re by far the best-maintained older properties in Roxbury today. They have flowers in window boxes. We created dozens of educational and service programs to make sure it was sustainable, involving the tenants at every stage, and most of them are now in the hands of nonprofits. … It was something people said over and over again couldn’t be done, and it was very satisfying to see it happen.
Q: I understand you recently spent four years in Oslo, where your husband was appointed ambassador, while still running Housing Partners back in Newton? How did you pull that off?
A: It’s amazing how you can stay in touch via email. Ten, 15 years ago, to do what I did would not have been possible. But actually the six-hour time difference, which I thought would be really terrible, worked in my favor. In the mornings, I could do embassy-related stuff when Boston wasn’t awake, and I started getting work stuff at 2 o’clock, and I’d stay up until midnight when everybody was leaving their office, and it kind of worked. I could do a dinner event while Boston was at lunch.
Q: Still, that’s a pretty hectic schedule!
A: It was. But it was an incomparable experience. … Norwegians are very proud of their country, and it’s the most beautiful place on earth, and we got to feel very much at home.
Q: Do you feel like it gave you a different perspective on your work here? Obviously their social services are completely different from ours.
A: It’s really a cradle-to-grave welfare system, in a country that has more money than any other country on earth. They’re an oil country, and they very smartly use their money – their sovereign wealth fund is a trillion dollars for a country of 5 million people, and they use 4 percent of the income to run the country, and the rest of it just gets saved. Although prices are very, very high, health care is completely paid for, education through a [doctorate], subsidized child care. Housing is their biggest expense. … It was very difficult to get Norwegians to understand the concept of affordable housing. It just doesn’t exist in Norway. It was an interesting experience, no question.
White’s Top Five Priorities In Affordable Housing:
- Affordable housing creation for middle-income people.
- Continue to increase state funding for rental assistance vouchers.
- Tackling the homelessness problem in the state.
- Come up with a way to better coordinate housing with services.
- Incentivizing cities and towns to produce more housing.
