Mary Tingerthal
Mary Tingerthal was the 13th employee at the newly formed Minnesota Housing Finance Agency in the mid-1970s. She spent a decade helping to create and run the agency’s home improvement lending program, and then she decided to leave to attend graduate school.
Mary Tingerthal, commissioner of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency
After that, her career took a lot of twists and turns, but her various jobs over the years prepared her to return to lead Minnesota Housing in 2011, when she was appointed commissioner by Gov. Mark Dayton.
“It allows me to make use of every job I have ever had in affordable housing,” Tingerthal says.
Through the years, she spent time in the private and public sector, working for familiar names in the affordable housing business. She had two stints at what became GMAC Residential Funding and worked for the city of St. Paul when the low-income housing credit (LIHTC) was being implemented, getting her first taste of underwriting developments and allocating credits when there hardly were any investors.
She has been one of only three CEOs to lead National Equity Fund, one of the nation’s largest LIHTC syndicators, and worked with New Markets Tax Credits at the Community Reinvestment Fund, one of the early allocatees for the funds. She also worked at the Housing Partnership Network, a business alliance of some of the nation’s largest nonprofits.
And then six years ago she returned to her former stomping grounds.
“I like to say my timing was perfect for coming back to Minnesota Housing. It was after the recession, and we had nowhere to go but up,” she says.
She credits the governor and legislature for their willingness to support affordable housing. In 2012, Minnesota Housing received $35 million in bonds to be used for housing and homeless programs.
“That has stepped up our ability to do supportive housing and preservation transactions for preserving federally assisted housing,” she says. “We did so well with the first allocation that we received authorization for $100 million in the same kind of bonding authority in 2014, then another $10 million after that. The amount of dollars that we’ve been able to attract to affordable housing, we haven’t seen this level since the mid-1980s.”
She also is proud of the strides made on the homeownership side. When she returned to Minnesota Housing, the agency started taking steps to rethink its single-family mortgage lending business and grow its downpayment assistance program.
“We were able to capitalize on the fact that the market was very hungry for single-family mortgage financing that came with downpayment assistance.”
Minnesota Housing also is working to reach out to households of color and help them become homeowners. In 2016, 32% of the loans that the agency made went to households of color compared with 11% for traditional mortgage lending.
However, there’s still a lot of work ahead for Tingerthal. “The one frustration for me is that even though we’ve mobilized a lot of resources, affordability is a bigger problem today that it was when I started.”
