Clark Ziegler speaks at the launch event for MHP's ONE+ Mortgage Program, held in Lynn in November 2024. Photo by Leise Jones Photography | Courtesy of MHP
The Massachusetts Housing Partnership announced that after 40 years, Executive Director Clark Ziegler will be retiring at the end of February 2026.
Ziegler himself let the news slip in a LinkedIn post Tuesday night.
“I think change is good and healthy, and I’m excited about that for the organization,” he said in an interview. “I sort of knew I would probably retire around age 70, so we’ve been having internal conversations about that for a while. Our board’s been prepared, and so I think it should be a good, healthy transition.”
During his tenure, the quasi-public housing finance agency and housing advocacy group has delivered financing or technical assistance in nearly every city and town in the commonwealth, including financing for more than 33,500 affordable rental units.
MHP’s ONE Mortgage program has financed 25,700 home purchases for low- and moderate-income first-time homebuyers, and MHP has delivered $6.5 billion in below-market bank financing for affordable housing and currently has $1.2 billion in assets under management thanks to a succession of recent local bank mergers.
The organization is funded in part through required contributions from merging Massachusetts-based banks.
His work helping inspire and then helping towns and cities implement the MBTA Communities Act is one of his crowning achievements, Ziegler said.
“The MBTA Communities Law as a whole was, in a lot of ways, our original idea,” he said. “I think the concept of every community bearing responsibility for allowing multifamily housing and being part of the housing solution was very much our idea, our proposal. So it feels really good to see that through”
“We now have well over 200,000 potential units, most of which didn’t exist before the law,” he added. “That feels really good to take an idea to not just the policy idea and legislation, but also on the ground implementation.”
The MHP board of directors has formed a search committee and engaged consultancy Bridge Partners to lead the national search for a new executive director.
