The Community Builders

The Community Builders is a nonprofit affordable housing developer, owner and manager founded in 1964 and headquartered in Boston. It builds and preserves mixed-income rental housing and pairs it with neighborhood programs, operating in more than a dozen states across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and South. The organization works through the full capital stack that affordable development requires: low-income housing tax credits, bond financing, HUD programs and public housing conversions under the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration. With Ascendant Neighborhood Development it was selected in February 2023 as the PACT partner team for Metro North Plaza and the Gaylord White Houses in East Harlem, a $272.6 million rehabilitation of 523 NYCHA apartments serving roughly 900 residents. Its portfolio runs to tens of thousands of units.

The Community Builders organises itself by region rather than by single headquarters, and the map is worth reading before contacting them. Offices group into five territories: New England covering Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island; Midwest covering Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin; Great Lakes covering Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky; Mid-Atlantic covering the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia; and New York/New Jersey. An enquiry routed to the right region reaches people who know the local financing environment and the local housing authority.

Accessibility is handled explicitly. Reasonable accommodations and modifications are available to keep programs available to people with disabilities, and requests can go to reception@tcbinc.org or 857-221-8600 rather than through a general enquiry queue.

The organisation states its mission plainly: to build and sustain strong communities where all people can thrive. That framing – communities rather than units – is the distinction between a housing developer and a housing organisation that also runs neighbourhood programming, and it explains why the regional structure exists in the first place.