1. OUTREACH, PARTNERSHIPS, AND COMMUNITY COLLABORATION
NJHMFA’s outreach, partnership, and collaboration strategies have many notable strengths. The Agency should continue to innovate in these areas to promote homeownership, stabilize neighborhoods, and shrink New Jersey’s racial wealth gap. These recommendations aim to increase knowledge of the Agency’s products among New Jersey communities that have encountered historical barriers to homeownership and wealth accumulation.17,18
provides an unwieldy webpage to parties seeking to connect with a lender institution.
Through community events, online webinars, traditional media coverage, social media, advertising, and a newly redesigned website, NJHMFA has taken steps to make its programs more accessible. Despite this progress, we find that the Agency’s outreach efforts generally do not harness targeted and tailored strategies to reach underserved communities proactively. This gap has been especially detrimental for borrowers who are Black and Asian, groups that make up 17.8 percent and 10.2 percent of the state’s population but only 9.9 percent and 1.3 percent of 2020 DPA recipients, respectively.19
NJHMFA partners with New Jersey’s diverse network of nonprofit housing and community development organizations. Given these organizations’ trust and familiarity with New Jersey’s underserved communities, the Agency should prioritize the new partnerships to better address the state’s racial homeownership gap.
The Agency’s outdated technology infrastructure and insufficient staffing currently impedes its efforts to reach prospective borrowers of color and firstgeneration home buyers. So do its outmoded data collection systems, the barriers between the Agency and consumers, and the private lenders who often poach potential clients.20 The Agency lacks accurate demographic information about borrowers from private lenders, inefficiently tracks contact information for partner organizations, and
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Beyond technological and staffing shortfalls, the Agency’s current outreach strategy relies on the institutional knowledge and expertise of a few staff members who oversee community engagement. This model limits the Agency’s ability to scale outreach to new audiences, and it risks major disruptions when those staff members leave the Agency.
The Agency’s meaningful steps to partner with outside organizations have, at times, been frustrated by inconsistent communication with affordable housing stakeholders. Our conversations revealed that many housing organizations lack certainty about the Agency’s key policy priorities, vision for state’s affordable housing landscape, and baseline expectations for the role these organizations should play. And many organizations say they are reacting to the Agency’s new programs, rather than receiving an opportunity to shape them. This dynamic tends to damage trust and frustrate the Agency’s mission.
