Then in 2008, Harborlight hired Andrew McKenzie-DeFranza, a divinity school-trained social services professional to lead the discernment process. Meeting every two weeks over sandwiches in the First Baptist basement, board and staff determined that the mission could best endure, perhaps in a new iteration, via a multi-party merger. The logic: together we can have the size and strength to do the types of sophisticated deals that would be needed.
“Part of the appeal of having fingers in the pies of multiple communities is that land is slow to turn over” throughout Greater Boston, said Andrew Mikula, senior fellow on housing at the Pioneer Institute, a think tank that studies Massachusetts economic and policy issues. To keep deals moving in a low-turnover environment, he said, developers need to have multiple projects going at once. Regional strategies, rather than purely local ones, make that approach more feasible.
Harborlight’s merger with other affordable housing organizations cleared the way for scaled-up opportunity, but the path still wasn’t clear when the ink dried on merger documents. Many decisions would have to be made in coming years about which professional services to provide, which housing projects to add or drop from the portfolio and which organizational merger opportunities to embrace or turn down.
Harborlight would need both a financial and moral compass, rooted in its original mission but not hamstrung by it. Proposed projects that would have passed muster in the early decades are now deemed too small to be worthy of new investment, for instance.
Saying no, even to some enticing opportunities, became a necessity. For instance, Harborlight once ran a homeless shelter, which felt like a fit with its moral values. But after a few years, the board determined that homeless services were intensive, specialized and not Harborlight’s particular niche. Certain health services were also once part of Harborlight’s repertoire of services for tenants, but those are now provided by contractors in arrangements that help hold down Harborlight’s costs and improve quality of delivery.
