I bring everything I am to my work. I am not a detached, objective counselor – I am an engaged advocate. The success that I feel each day, week and year is directly connected and correlated to the success of my clients. If their project can’t proceed, I feel that failure and frustration. When we secure the needed financing or structure around obstacles to get their project closed and built, I feel that success and pride. Our work is affordable housing that serves people who need it – that’s what drives us.
Erik Hoffman works exclusively on structuring, negotiating and closing affordable multifamily housing projects. In parallel to the legal work, Erik is fully engaged in our community as a collaborator who actively shares new approaches and financing concepts, and as a passionate advocate for public investments and improvements to financing programs.
Representing for-profit and nonprofit developers in acquisitions, rehabilitation or new construction, Erik’s primary expertise is securing and combining multiple layers of funding often in complex phased, mixed use redevelopment projects. This includes tax exempt bonds, mezzanine and subordinate debt from a variety of sources, such as National Housing Trust Funds, private lenders, HOME and Community Development Block Grants, Section 108 securitizations, state and local housing trust funds, and tax increment financing.
Erik pioneered the “9-4 Twinned” or “Hybrid 9-4” structure that has been used nationwide to stretch resources and finance more units. Erik has structured over 60 such transactions (120 project financings), and has also presented on this financing structure over 40 times to various state housing agencies, housing authorities and local government lenders, state and regional housing conferences, developers, and college students.
Erik has similarly advocated for enhanced preservation financing and programs, focusing on erecting barriers to “aggregators” (syndicators in our industry that use litigation as a business strategy to extract value from affordable properties they do not deserve contractually) – developing form rights of first refusal for Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF), as well as for a variety of state housing finance agencies from New York City to Virginia. Erik also organizes advocacy and awareness groups, such as Preservation Aggregators Round Table, and participates in litigation to counter these aggregators and bolster affordable housing opportunities in our communities.
The dual focus as a practitioner and policy advocate stems from the diversity of his professional experiences. From serving as Director of Real Estate Finance and Grants for Fairfax County’s affordable housing and economic development programs and as Associate General Counsel to the District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency, to being outside counsel to the District’s Revenue Bond Program on their 501(c)(3) financings, Erik fully appreciates the role, potential, and challenges of local and state government to finance and protect the essential public good of affordable housing.
“Necessity is the Mother of Invention” – the proverb derived from Plato’s phrase, “Our need will be the real creator” is the theme that motivates me. Affordable housing is all about surmounting obstacles – financing a project that – without relentless creativity – would otherwise be an impossibility in the marketplace. Those obstacles – and the need to innovate around them – energize me and fuel our collective work.
