Bay Area Housing For All: A $10-20 Billion Regional Bond for Affordable Housing

As San Francisco Foundation's Chief Impact Officer, Judith brings extensive experience in policy and systems change, working in partnership with movement and power-building efforts, to achieve greater racial equity and economic inclusion. She leads the Foundation’s community impact efforts across the Bay Area focusing on the people, places, and power that can advance the Foundation’s equity agenda. Prior to joining San Francisco Foundation, Judith was the President of PolicyLink, where she had been since its inception, becoming President in 2004. Her leadership helped ignite a new national narrative and action around racial equity, inclusion, and opportunity for communities of color with a focus on creating more equitable economies in communities, cities, regions, states, and across the nation. She was instrumental in advancing several efforts with the Obama administration including Promise Neighborhoods, to improve the lives of children from cradle to career, and the national Healthy Food Financing Initiative which unlocked billions of dollars to improve access to healthy food in communities across the country. 

Kate Hartley, the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority’s (BAHFA) inaugural director, has worked throughout the Bay Area on housing financing and development for over three decades. She began her career with a market-rate developer converting vacant factories into new residential developments in San Francisco. She then focused on affordable development, building housing for seniors, families, and people with special needs. As a regional financial consultant, Kate specialized in layering low-income housing tax credits, tax-exempt bonds, state subsidies, and HUD funds to help her clients build new developments and preserve existing homes. Kate worked at the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) from 2014-2019, serving first as deputy director and later director, where she oversaw the financing and completion of 10,000 new or preserved affordable units. Prior to her appointment as director of BAHFA, she was the Chief Lending and Investment Officer for the Housing Accelerator Fund, where she helped create a new financing and development model that produced homeless housing faster and more cost-effectively than typical publicly funded developments. Kate’s current goal is to provide pathways at the regional level that more efficiently deliver the housing the Bay Area needs.

Geeta Rao serves as a Senior Director at Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) in the Northern California office where she oversees the programmatic work and co-manages operations. Geeta brings 20 years of experience in affordable housing and community development: program design and implementation, policy development, technical assistance, legislative advocacy, community organizing and planning, and coalition building. Geeta serves on the leadership team of Bay Area Housing for All (BAHA), an effort to place a $10-20 billion housing measure on the 2024 ballot for the San Francisco Bay Area. Geeta led Enterprise’s co-sponsorship efforts of AB 1487, which created the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA) and co-authored The Elephant in the Region: Charting a Path for Bay Area Metro to Lead a Bold Regional Housing Agenda. Geeta lives in San Francisco and spends her time baking Midwestern treats, dancing at ODC Dance Commons, and (reluctantly) birdwatching across California with her two boys.