Accelerating Investments for Healthy Communities

 From 2018 to 2021, Accelerating Investments for Healthy Communities (AIHC) helped six pioneering hospitals and health systems deepen their investment in affordable housing and advance policies and practices that foster equitable housing solutions.

Using CCI’s Capital Absorption Framework, health systems that were already investing beyond their walls expanded the scale of their work.

Health institutions can be game-changing participants in efforts to improve conditions in their communities. Leaders in this field are investing upstream in the social determinants of health, using their assets—financial resources, land, expertise, and relationships—to create more equitable, sustainable, affordable, and healthy places that nurture wellbeing. 

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Creating Affordable Housing

Participating health systems helped advance affordable housing by investing capital, making grants and guarantees, and offering surplus land. They also convened local partners and leveraged their skills and relationships to push for affordable housing policies and funding. Teams: 

Helped activate a dormant Right of First Refusal policy that, in its first two years of operation, preserved six properties with a total of 1,213 affordable rental units. 

Invested $3 million in an $9 million revolving loan fund and provided land for affordable housing development. 

Secured $15 million in county ARPA funds and an additional $10 million in state funds to establish an affordable housing preservation loan fund. 

Provided a $1 million grant to establish a low-interest loan fund to remove financing barriers for small developers rehabbing vacant houses for affordable homeownership.

Invested $874,000 into a neighborhood home repair program with 100% of contracts going to firms owned by people of color. 

Collaborated with city government, the local land trust, and local and national funders to produce 40 rental and homeownership units in a neighborhood near the hospital, with another 30 planned for the year to come. 

Received a $5 million grant to address systemic problems that drive differences in economic opportunity within segregated neighborhoods 

AIHC’s Impact on Housing

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The six health systems deployed over $31 million of their own resources to make loans and grants for affordable housing.

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The six health systems’ advocacy helped secure $500 million in government funding for affordable housing in their local geographies. 

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The six health systems directly supported development or preservation of more than 1,200 affordable homes. 

Participating Health Systems

Six hospitals and health systems were part of AIHC. As anchor organizations in their communities, each of them worked with partners such as community organizations, foundations, community development financial institutions, nonprofit developers, and advocacy groups.  

The six hospitals and health systems were:

Bon Secours Mercy Health

Baltimore, Maryland, and Cincinnati, Ohio

Boston Medical Center 

Boston, Massachusetts

CommonSpirit Health

San Bernardino, California

Kaiser Permanente®

Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties, Maryland

Nationwide Children’s Hospital®

Columbus, Ohio

UPMC Health Plan

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Testimonial

We have been influencers. We have influenced the way that people think about what’s possible. We’ve influenced people to have the ability to think different themselves. We’ve influenced the city to think different. There’s another hospital that has $69 million they have to spend, and we’re at the table to influence them, to help them know how to spend that money. 

Thea James, Boston Medical Center

Program Participants

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