New Partners for Smart Growth (NPSG) holds their 17th annual conference in San Francisco on Thursday 2/1 through Saturday 2/3 at the Hilton Union Square Hotel. Themed “Practical Tools and Innovative Strategies for Creating Great Communities,” NPSG’s 2018 conference features a dynamic speaker series and eight thematic tracks that address timely housing, transportation, planning and environmental challenges, with smart growth and equity as the threads that weave among each track.
Conference tours will offer attendees the chance to learn firsthand about local development initiatives across the Bay Area (including tours in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley). In addition to helping to coordinate the NPSG housing track, Seifel Consulting arranged the Thursday morning “Downtown San Francisco Transbay Transit Center District Tour,” which will feature the numerous public private partnerships under development and recently built. Not only are these developments creating San Francisco’s newest mixed-income neighborhood (featuring 35% affordable housing), they are providing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the new Transit Center.
On Saturday morning, we will delve more deeply into funding strategies for affordable housing. “Paying for Affordable Housing,” will explore the opportunities and challenges in raising capital to fund affordable housing, including multi-layered investment funds, cap and trade auction proceeds, and local ballot measures. Session attendees will leave with a greater understanding of successful approaches to fund housing within their own community. Speakers include Amie Fishman of Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, Julijs Liepins of Forsyth Street, and Brian Prater of the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF). Libby will moderate this engaging session.
Full details on the 2018 New Partners for Smart Growth conference, as well as registration information, can be found here. Presented by the Local Government Commission, NPSG draws a national audience of federal, state and local leaders who are committed to building safer, healthier and more livable communities everywhere. In recent years, the NPSG Conference was held in St. Louis, Portland and Baltimore.
UPDATES (February 5)
Click here for a peek at the accompanying presentation to the Transit Center tour.
Click here to explore the Saturday morning Finance Panel "Paying for Affordable Housing"
