Steve Ballmer upon learning that he doesn’t have to read WSHFC’s entire QAP to build affordable housing.
THE FWD #271 • 710 words
Building affordable housing quickly is simple, if you happen to have a billionaire.
Every other big swing at the housing shortage in the state of Washington has had to survive Olympia first. Not this one.
When The Ballmer Group pledged up to $170 million a year for early childhood education last fall, lawmakers had to pass a bill just to create an account that could receive the money. Their newest bet on the state skips that step. This time, no legislative action is required, so the funding is available right away.
That bet is the Washington Family Housing Fund (WAFAM), a partnership between Ballmer Group and the Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) aimed at building 10,000 new affordable rental homes for families. The mechanics are simple.
- Ballmer Group pre-approves a forgivable loan of up to $150,000 per unit.
- WSHFC finalizes the terms and originates the loan.
- WSHFC manages compliance for the life of the property.
Ten loans have already been approved, totaling $160 million toward 1,120 affordable apartments, in projects ranging from West Seattle to the small town of Twisp. The first is already under construction in Frederickson, Pierce County.
Three things about WAFAM are worth sitting with longer than a press release usually allows.
It doesn’t touch LIHTC.
Most new subsidy pools in affordable housing get layered on top of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, competing for the same limited annual allocation every other deal in the pipeline is also chasing. WAFAM was built to sidestep that fight. The fund deliberately steers around projects that already use LIHTC or other competitive public subsidy, so every unit it finances adds new supply rather than duplicating a deal that would have happened anyway.
Ballmer Group’s John Griffith frames it as an entirely separate lane of capital, a different route to breaking ground rather than another lender crowding the same subsidy stack that developers already fight over. For an industry that treats the 9% credit allocation like table stakes, that’s a noteworthy and novel way in.
One donor is bankrolling all of it, and the model is copy-and-paste.
No public money is in the mix at all. Ballmer Group, the philanthropy Steve and Connie Ballmer built off Microsoft equity, is footing the entire bill itself. If the fund hits its full 10,000-unit target at $150,000 a unit, the tab could run as high as $1.5 billion, though Ballmer Group is careful not to commit to that specific figure, framing its pledge instead as covering whatever it takes to reach the goal.
WSHFC isn’t putting up capital either. Ballmer Group has separately granted the commission money to cover its own start-up costs for running WAFAM, including legal expenses and upgrades to its reporting system, so even the state’s overhead comes from the philanthropy rather than the budget.
That detail that should get other funders’ attention. The structure doesn’t require a ballot measure or a new bureaucracy, but does require two key things: a state housing finance agency willing to be the lender, and a donor willing to write forgivable-loan checks.
Every state already has the first ingredient sitting on the shelf. The second is scarcer. WAFAM works because Ballmer Group can cover a nine-figure commitment, not because Steve Ballmer specifically had to be the person behind it. The model is a template for any funder with comparable capital. (So please forward this blog to any one of Virginia’s billionaires, if you have their email.)
It goes deeper than LIHTC usually bothers to anymore.
Every WAFAM unit has to be affordable to households earning roughly 50% AMI, priced well below comparable market-rate units nearby. That is not a building-wide average. It’s the floor for every single home.
Compare that to where LIHTC has drifted. Since 2018, the program’s income-averaging option has let owners include units serving households earning up to 80% AMI, as long as the property’s overall average stays at or below 60% AMI. That flexibility helped a lot of deals pencil out, but it also meant fewer LIHTC units actually land at the deep end of affordability that WAFAM requires across the board. WAFAM doesn’t average anything, and it doesn’t need a tax-credit allocation round to get there.
Ten deals in, WAFAM has already proven the model closes. The open question is whether any other billionaire in America is paying attention.