Diane Yentel
Diane Yentel fights to house the lowest-income people.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition
In 2016, she became president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an organization that educates and advocates to ensure that everyone has a home. It’s a new job but not a new cause for Yentel.
After college, she lived and worked for three years in rural Zambia as a Peace Corps volunteer, where she witnessed both deep poverty and great resilience. “I learned that, however humble the structure, the safety and security of a home was literally the foundation for all other possibilities in life,” she says.
When Yentel returned home, she worked on a national research study about the impacts of welfare reform on low-income women. “Each month, I interviewed the women in their homes, where they told me about their struggles to make ends meet. The difference that affordable housing made in their lives was clear. Those without it lived in constant fear of being evicted—and often they were—because despite their sacrifices and struggles they still couldn’t get ahead, stay ahead, and pay the rent.”
She went on earn a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas, concentrating on the systemic change needed to end poverty. Her first job out of graduate school was at the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, and she’s been working toward ending homelessness and housing poverty ever since. Prior to joining NLIHC, Yentel was vice president of public policy and government affairs at Enterprise Community Partners, where she led its federal, state, and local policy, research and advocacy programs.
Washington, D.C.–based NLIHC’s work includes its signature “Out of Reach” report, an annual look at the disparity between rental housing costs and renter income across the country. The organization has also been at the forefront in advocating for the National Housing Trust Fund. In 2017, it will continue to have a full agenda, working to safeguard and improve existing Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs and other resources and seizing opportunities to expand them, according to Yentel.
“Four years of ‘holding the line’ with level funding, of maintaining the status quo simply won’t do, not for the nearly 8 million extremely low-income households struggling to pay the rent each month; for the hundreds of thousands of families, elderly people, kids, and veterans living in shelters or on the streets; or for the over 5 million households receiving HUD-subsidized assistance and wanting access to better and healthier units, better paying jobs, better schools for their kids and ways to save some of their limited income for something more,” Yentel says.
