Danielle Samalin
Title: Vice President, Homeownership Initiatives at Housing Partnership Network; President, Framework
Age: 36
Experience: 10 years
Always drawn to a career in the nonprofit world, Danielle Samalin’s interest turned from international to domestic development work as she was drawn in to the problem of supplying affordable housing – something that hit the New York City native very close to home. Currently, she runs a online homeownership education program, Framework, for the Housing Partnership Network, and was recently recognized as one of Housing Wire’s 2014 “Women of Influence.”
Q: What got you interested in housing? How did you end up with the Housing Partnership Network?
A: My background is in urban planning and community development. [In college] I was very interested in international development, and I thought that would be my path. And then in grad school, I saw very quickly that urban communities, including the one I was living in, provided some exciting opportunities and significant challenges that I had the skills to address. And I ended up here. It was sort of a winding path, but I feel like I’m in the right place.
Q: You mentioned that your parents’ experience also influenced you?
A: Growing up in New York City, my parents were both artists, and I sort of saw firsthand the impact that not owning a home could have on the ability of a family to remain in the community where they live. Through their displacement, I became aware of how important it is to focus on homeownership as a wealth-building and community-stabilization tool. They were in Downtown Brooklyn. It was a great neighborhood, and I loved growing up there. It was an affordable neighborhood for artists, and then, after the economic boom of the ’90s, all of a sudden it wasn’t. Its proximity to Manhattan, the fact that it really is a great place to live, I think it became unaffordable [for people like my parents]. The neighborhood changed a lot – mostly in very positive ways. The fact of the matter is, my family could have benefitted much more from that neighborhood change if they had owned a home. If they had known back in 1978 when they first moved to the neighborhood that the financial decision of committing to a mortgage versus paying rent – while it might in the medium term have been cheaper – it would have been a very positive long-term decision for the wealth-building of our family. And they just didn’t have the advice.
Q: How did you first get involved in affordable housing?
A: [In grad school at NYU I started doing] community development work, working with local credit unions that were trying to provide financial services to un-banked populations in their neighborhoods in Brooklyn. And you could immediately see, if this credit union developed a mortgage product, then residents would no longer be getting their mortgages from the Laundromat down the street. [And that got me interested in the mortgage finance world.] At the time, there were these products out there that were less-sustainable, less affordable, with much less commitment to education of the homebuyers – and they were being marketed very aggressively. And the products that were more sustainable and healthy were being developed by these local credit unions that didn’t have the marketing budgets and didn’t have the systems in place to ramp up and get out and sell their product.
Q: And that tied into to your work with Framework?
A: Well, Framework sort of emerged out of a belief that educated buyers are successful homeowners. The data shows that people avoid foreclosure if they are educated. So we at the Housing Partnership Network got together with one of our partner members, Minnesota Homeownership Center, and we thought, ok, [let’s] imagine an ideal homebuying market, where homeowership education is as natural a part of the buying process as finding a Realtor. How can we do this? How can we provide this in a way that’s intuitive, interactive, mobile, something that really speaks to the new generation of home buyers? … We tried to design [Framework] so that when they’re searching online for this information, they find us first, and we become their trusted partner through their home search. It’s certainly very different from how we saw people buying homes leading up to the foreclosure crisis.
Top Five Challenges Millennial Homebuyers Face:
- Being scared to buy because of witnessing the housing crash.
- Access to credit.
- Student loan debt.
- Being confused by the process.
- Lack of information – buyers need tools that aren’t trying to steer them to a particular product.
