About this Guide
In Mississippi and around the country, many residents continue to face barriers to finding housing they can afford and neighborhoods are blighted with vacant, dilapidated homes. The state is fortunate to have dedicated local developers and nonprofit organizations working to solve these issues, however, the process of creating new housing— especially affordable housing— is often complex and difficult to navigate, particularly for those who are new to development.
The goal of this guide is to cut through the complicated and burdensome process of developing affordable housing and to give mission-oriented developers a phased approach to use when tackling their project. This guide is intended to help developers overcome challenges they identified during a broader research effort by Enterprise Community Partners and Mississippi Home Corporation.
The Mississippi Affordable Housing Developer Guide is divided into eight sections, six of which follow a phase of affordable housing development. The phases are Visioning, Planning and Predevelopment, Site Selection and Design, Financial Modeling and Funding, Construction and Stewardship. Within each section are a few key ideas, typically highlighting capacity, funding, and community engagement. There is an additional section focused on building a career in affordable housing development. Useful models, checklists, and worksheets for developers can be found in Tools and Resources.
It is important to remember that development is an iterative and non-linear process. You may find yourself circling back to topics addressed in visioning or predevelopment at various stages of the development process, especially if you are new to affordable housing. This is to be expected. Feel free to start anywhere you like, but keep in mind some materials may have been covered in earlier phases.
Who Should Use This Guide
This guide is designed to assist first-time and emerging developers, including housing authorities, nonprofits, for-profit developers, Community Housing Development Organizations (CHDOs) and Community Development Corporations (CDCs). Elected officials and board members may also find it useful to understand the scope of new development and to guide their priorities. This can be seen as a tool for any stakeholder who is involved in the complex process of developing affordable housing.
How to Use This Guide
Becoming a developer can be a complex undertaking that requires a deep understanding of housing options accessible to low-income individuals and families and requires a deep understanding of federal and state funding programs, community needs, design considerations and regulations. The purpose of this guide is to assist emerging housing developers across the state with homeownership and rental housing development. This guide supports housing developers as they seek to build development capacity and access resources that will lead to a stronger housing stock in Mississippi.
This guide is organized step-by-step, covering the stages of housing development from planning to funding to construction. This guide includes practical tools, checklists, or resources that you can directly apply to your project. These might help with things like project timelines, funding opportunities, or community engagement strategies. You can customize the guide to show you only relevant information if you know whether your project will be homeownership or rental.
Acknowledgements
The Mississippi Home Corporation (MHC) engaged Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) to help increase the number of developers participating in its state and federal funding programs. MHC’s aim is to build the capacity of Mississippi developers and development organizations that can help meet the agency’s housing goals, with a particular focus on tapping the potential of small and emerging developers, who, if given the right tools and training, can multiply their housing impact. To reach this admirable and ambitious goal, Enterprise and MHC worked together to complete a developer guide with a series of trainings tailored to these developers.
About Enterprise
Enterprise Community Partners is a national nonprofit that exists to make a good home possible for the millions of families without one. Enterprise supports community development organizations on the ground. We aggregate and invest capital for impact in homes and communities. We advance housing policy at every level of government. We build and manage communities ourselves. Everything we do is informed by the residents we serve.
Enterprise’s Tribal Nations and Rural team provides capacity building support to rural, Native and tribal housing organizations, such as Tribally Designated Housing Entities (TDHEs) and Tribal Housing Authorities (THAs). We provide funding and training along with technical assistance to organizations to help create healthy, safe, green affordable homes and to increase opportunities for economic advancement for individuals and families in both rural and Native communities.
The Enterprise Gulf Coast team began working across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas shortly after the 2005 hurricanes and resulting flooding devastated the region. Together with partners and funders, we have helped create or preserve over 100,000 affordable homes for families by leveraging over $6.5 billion in capital. Since 2005, our Enterprise Gulf Coast team has provided technical assistance to developers, nonprofits, and state and local governments to increase affordable housing supply in the region.
