For more than a decade, San Francisco and its surrounding counties have faced severe housing shortages and tragic levels of homelessness. As president of the Bay Area affordable housing developer MidPen Housing, Matt Franklin ’87 has plenty to keep him busy.
“At some level, we’re victims of our own success,” Franklin says. Since 2010, he explains, the big tech companies of the Bay Area have created more than 700,000 jobs and “been the job engine of the national recovery.” But at the same time, the region has created only approximately 100,000 new housing units. That explains why homeless tent encampments are a common sight in San Francisco and low-wage workers in the region often cram 12 people into a three-bedroom home.
In his 12 years at the helm of the nonprofit MidPen, Franklin has worked to change that. The $1.7 billion company has developed and now manages 8,000 units of affordable housing — all of which are income-restricted or subsidized — in 10 Bay Area counties. MidPen has 4,000 additional units in the pipeline and 700 currently under construction. In addition to his work with MidPen, Franklin has also served on the boards of the National Housing Trust, the Housing Partnership Network, and the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California.
Franklin brings both passion and a wealth of private and public sector experience to his role. He grew up in Ohio, where his parents — a foundation executive and a public school teacher — impressed upon him that work was about “the kind of impact it could have on other people’s lives.” At Colgate, he studied political science and economics and spent his junior year abroad at the London School of Economics. “I knew I wanted to work in social and economic development in underserved areas, but I didn’t know the context,” Franklin says.
After a stint in international development, he earned a master’s in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. There, he studied under leading housing economist William Apgar, who ignited Franklin’s interest in affordable housing.
When Apgar became the Federal Housing Commissioner during President Bill Clinton’s second term, he recruited Franklin to be deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. After three years working at the federal level, Franklin moved to California and worked for Gov. Gray Davis, as the state’s top housing policy adviser. His next stop was San Francisco, where he directed then mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Housing.
In that role, Franklin helped implement an innovative model of “supportive housing” that has been adopted by other cities and towns. “We realized that we were asking too much of folks who were in crisis to stabilize their lives before we provided housing,” Franklin says. “The supportive housing theory skips all that and says, ‘Let’s put people in housing, help them stabilize, and bring the services, such as mental health and substance abuse [counseling], to them.’”
Franklin describes his tenants at MidPen properties as responsible, low-income people who simply need housing amid the wealth in the Bay Area. MidPen has built 1,000 units in Mountain View, where Google is based, and 600 in Menlo Park, home of Facebook. “When we help a low-income family move into those communities that have great schools and great job opportunities, we often have been able to shift the curve of that family, in terms of economic empowerment, for generations,” says Franklin. “I feel fortunate to watch that happen and see the impact echo over time.”