The Houston Housing Authority, the largest and most well-funded in the state, has tapped David Northern as its CEO, naming a permanent leader as rising home prices widen an affordability gap.
Houston hired Northern from the city of Birmingham, the Houston Business Journal reported. As the Alabama city’s housing chief, he spearheaded initiatives including $6 million of safety and security upgrades for public housing. Northern has spent a quarter-century in the business.
Evictions in the Texas city returned to pre-pandemic levels last year as rents spiked 14 percent and shortages have driven home prices to records.
“There are some amazing partners there,” he told the Business Journal in an interview this week. “I know the mayor and the city have some aggressive goals related to affordability and housing numbers.”
Northern plans to emphasize community engagement, “being at the table and helping people to understand that when we build affordable housing, we’re not transplanting people from other places,” he said.
“We’ve got a working class,” he said. “Who’s going to work at Starbucks? Who’s going to be a teacher? We want to build affordable housing for the community members who are right there and not focus on individuals thinking that we’re trying to transplant people from other communities to those communities.”
In a 2020 interview with Al.com, Northern shared one of his management strategies for engaging with communities that are averse to new projects, which he called the Balcony/Dance Floor approach.
“I believe you have to get down on the dance floor with residents rather than just sitting on top and managing from the balcony,” he said.
In interviews, Northern been open about his background growing up in Gary, Indiana, a city known in the 1990s as the “murder capital of the U.S.” His mother was a senior in high school when he was born and his father was in prison on gang-related charges when he was an infant. He was diagnosed with a learning disability in high school after scoring poorly on standardized testing.
“My story is powerful,” he said. “Some people may be motivated by it.”
In August, Northern welcomed Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia L. Fudge to Birmingham to promote the Biden-Harris Administration’s Build Back Better legislation which included historic investments in housing construction.
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