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Helen Leung opened escrow just a few days into the new year. She had six months to raise $8.3 million, and while she had some ideas, she didn’t know yet where she would find all of it.
Over the previous 18 months, Leung had raised more than $5 million, successfully closing escrow for three acquisitions on behalf of LA Más, the northeast Los Angeles nonprofit where she’s executive director. Based in the largely Latino and Asian neighborhood known as Frogtown, LA Más wasn’t even in the housing market until about two years ago.
But Leung feels pressure to move even faster. Since growing up in Frogtown, she’s witnessed how rental properties here and all over Los Angeles have become prime targets for speculative investors whose business models depend on raising rents every year by the maximum amount allowed by law. Many have used loopholes to flip rent-stabilized buildings into market-rate rentals or condos.
LA Más aims instead to take properties off the speculative market for good, minimizing the amount that rents go up every year, and giving tenants a final say in key decisions about their buildings.
Residents and LA Más staff at the inspection of the Drew Street property. (Photo courtesy LA Más)
This acquisition would test Leung’s limits so far. It wasn’t for just one property. It was for two, neighboring, rent-stabilized, low-rise apartment buildings, both built in the ‘60s on Drew Street in Glassell Park. With a total of 31 units, this acquisition would more than double the housing portfolio at LA Más.
But LA Más has to compete with the speculators. That means accepting the market price — as well as the tight timelines — and figuring out where to get the money after opening escrow. In this case, the price tag was just over $6 million for the two Drew Street apartment complexes. The rest of the $8.3 million raised would cover badly needed rehab and maintenance.
It took a little longer than expected, but LA Más successfully closed escrow on the Drew Street acquisition in mid-August. The capital stack included a joint-venture co-investment from a larger nonprofit, local philanthropic dollars, individual community investors, and public dollars from a brand new county agency. It’s the first time LA Más is tapping into public funding and community investors.
“We came up with something very complicated but not that complicated,” Leung says. “Private sector landlords and investors do this stuff all the time. We’re taking those skill sets and using them for our community, which is not conventional in traditional housing work.”
A change of mission
Just days before closing escrow in August, children had taken over the LA Más office. The nonprofit shares office space with arts organization Clockshop on a pair of former industrial lots in Frogtown, one of which Clockshop has converted into a courtyard and bamboo garden.
The children and their families came by for Somos NELA, LA Más’s twice-monthly night market featuring food, vintage clothing, and jewelry from a selection of northeast Los Angeles vendors. There were newcomers, too, some just attracted by the sound of music and the smell of bacon-wrapped hot dogs and Oaxacan tlayuda while strolling along the nearby LA River Greenway.
The night market started around two years ago as part of LA Más’s pivot from a broader design-focused nonprofit to a community-based organization. Leung joined the organization in 2013, and had been serving as co-executive director along with co-founder Elizabeth Timme (a Next City Vanguard), until COVID-19 changed everything.
As a design nonprofit, LA Más had been helping working-class homeowners build accessory dwelling units and small business owners modernize their storefronts.
The pandemic cut those efforts short. Amid the shutdown, LA Más started using its office as an organizing base and staging ground for mutual aid around the neighborhood and across northeast Los Angeles.
There was no going back, and the organization recognized that its mission had changed. The design nonprofit’s board members stepped down after electing a new board emphasizing northeast Los Angeles community members. A year of community engagement identified housing as a top priority for the organization going forward: Something had to be done about speculative investors increasingly coming into northeast Los Angeles and flipping rent-stabilized apartments and other long-affordable homes into market-rate housing.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Frogtown, Helen Leung joined LA Más in 2013. (Photo by Matthew Scott)
It’s a big investment of time and energy for any under-staffed, cash-strapped, community-based nonprofit to make the jump into the housing market. And LA Más wasn’t going to wait for the public sector or a friendly nonprofit to sell it some land or buildings at a deep discount. It was jumping straight into acquiring properties on the open market before they fell into the hands of less community-minded owners.
“It’s not scary because I think about all the investors and property owners who have been doing housing with a lot less heart or different goals,” Leung says. “It’s a little daunting but there’s enough values-aligned people and funding sources out there.”
Leung had prior experience working in local land use and planning, but LA Más worked to recruit additional board members with experience in housing and community land trusts.
Every time LA Más opened escrow, the organization put itself in a crunch to raise the money in time to close. The nonprofit may have to take out loans where it makes sense. But other common tools for affordable housing, like tax credits, would be way too slow for this.
Penciling out the first acquisition
In 2023, a longtime northeast Los Angeles community member passed away, leaving a five-unit rent-stabilized property on Arvia Street in Cypress Park to her six children. One of the late owner’s grandsons, an artist named Andrés Cortes, had been living there for 15 years as a renter and had become known locally for the mural he’d been expanding for a decade in the abutting alley.
On a cultural walking tour led by Clockshop, which stopped by to see the mural, Cortes connected with an LA Más board member and learned that LA Más was looking to make its first acquisition.
At a listed price of $1.5 million, the family was fielding interest from investors and developers who openly planned to push out existing tenants and flip the property into something much more lucrative. That didn’t sit well with the family, who continued to hold out — giving LA Más a chance.
But even after an appraisal brought the price down to $1.2 million for LA Más, the maximum legal rent-stabilized monthly cashflow from the property wasn’t enough to cover the monthly payments for what the nonprofit would need to borrow to cover $1.6 million in total costs, including rehab work that the property needed.
“We commit to raising more upfront for initial capital investments and maintenance so we’re not slumlords and can make long-deferred improvements for residents,” Leung says.
In discussions with the residents at the Arvia Street property, LA Más floated an idea to add a new market-rate accessory dwelling unit (ADU), replacing a shed that was in use as an artist studio on the property. Residents accepted that as part of the plan, but there still wasn’t enough cash flow for a conventional debt-financed acquisition and rehab to “pencil out,” as it’s known in real estate development lingo.
The building at Arvia Street in northeast Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy LA Más)
The solution emerged from conversations with Self-Help, an unusual hybrid financial institution based in North Carolina. Self-Help includes the state-chartered Self-Help Credit Union, which operates in a few East Coast states; Self-Help Federal Credit Union, which works in California and a handful of other states; and Self-Help Ventures Fund, a nonprofit investment fund with a nationwide scope. All three entities are also federally-certified community development financial institutions, or CDFIs.
Read more: The World’s Biggest Flannel Mill Sat Vacant for Decades. A CDFI Gave It New Life.
Pre-pandemic, LA Más had worked with Self-Help Federal Credit Union on its ADU program. The nonprofit worked with homeowners to design and find contractors to build ADUs that would be rented to Section 8 federal housing voucher holders. Self-Help Federal Credit Union would provide the financing for individual homeowners to make it happen.
This time, it was the nonprofit investment fund that came into play.
“Credit unions are highly regulated and you can only use deposits for certain things,” says Tim Quinn, senior project manager at Self-Help Ventures Fund. “[Self-Help’s founders] started the Ventures Fund in order to do things that don’t fit in the traditional credit union bucket, like different types of investments, different types of loans.”
Rather than making a loan, Self-Help Ventures Fund made a joint-venture co-ownership deal with LA Más. If Leung could come up with 20-25% of the $1.6 million needed, Self-Help Ventures Fund would chip in the remaining 75-80%, and the two organizations would split property ownership shares accordingly.
As a co-developer instead of just a lender, Self-Help Ventures Fund would be much more hands-on, but it could deploy more patient, more flexible funding it had specifically earmarked for doing real estate development. CDFIs are almost exclusively lenders, but Self-Help is unusual in that it also has decades of experience developing real estate in its home state, know-how it could share directly as a joint-venture partner to an emerging developer like LA Más.
“There was more of a comfort level with trying something new and different that we’d never done before with a partner that we did have a relationship with, but this being a much more intense version of that relationship,” Quinn says.
LA Más and Self-Help jointly opened escrow for the Arvia Street property on July 30, 2024. For the first time, Leung was on the hook to cover LA Más’s end of the deal — without knowing exactly where the money would come from.
A sketch of the Drew Street property plans. (Photo courtesy LA Más)
“We just opened escrow and then we asked lots of people,” Leung says. “Every single time we open escrow, there’s a bunch of nos. Some say they don’t invest in projects, some need us to be more proven, or they say the timeline doesn’t work for now but come back to us later. And every time I close escrow, I collect more people who say no and I come back to them the next time.”
The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, another large national community development lender, chipped in with a $40,000 grant to LA Más for the Arvia Street acquisition. Two weeks before closing, a $250,000 grant came in from LA4LA, a public-private fund for affordable housing created through a collaboration with the California Community Foundation and the office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. LA Más and Self-Help closed escrow to acquire the Arvia Street property that fall.
Making non-traditional acquisitions routine
At the beginning of 2025, LA Más established a community governance committee made up of working-class northeast Los Angeles residents who meet every other month — more often than the nonprofit’s quarterly board meetings — to discuss potential acquisitions and other strategic decisions around the nonprofit’s housing portfolio. Some of the committee members are also vendors at the Somos NELA night markets.
The goal for LA Más is to acquire buildings that are still home to working-class residents, loosely defined as households earning up to 50% of area median income. Acquiring buildings that had already been flipped was not an option.
While LA Más has to accept the market price for properties, the combined acquisition and rehab costs still had to be low enough to justify a purchase while maintaining existing rent levels. It’s a balance that the community governance committee helps Leung to figure out. Sellers also have to give LA Más time to fundraise after opening escrow. There’s always risk with any acquisition, but the committee helps decide if the potential impact is worth it based on their collective vision.
LA Más also looks for opportunities to be creative financially — like the addition of the market-rate accessory dwelling unit at the Arvia Street property, which now rents out at $2,800 a month as a two-bedroom, two-bath unit.
The LA Más community governance committee went right to work. After the Arvia Street acquisition was featured in The Los Angeles Times, a group of tenants on Hancock Street in the Lincoln Heights section of northeast Los Angeles read the story and they reached out to LA Más. They had a five unit building that was for sale and in need of rehab.
After evaluating the opportunity with the community governance committee, LA Más jointly opened escrow with Self-Help Ventures Fund to acquire and rehab the Hancock Street property on March 10, 2025. Self-Help put in $910,000 as a 75% owner of the building, and Leung was on the clock to raise the rest for a total of $1.2 million.
For the nonprofit’s end of the deal, Leung got $200,000 from the WHH Foundation, a local family foundation, in the form of a program-related investment — a below-market rate loan that qualifies as part of the 5% of a foundation’s endowment that the IRS mandates foundations to spend every year.
As much as Self-Help can bring to the table as a joint-venture partner and as much as LA Más can raise in the form of grants, Leung wants to spread those resources to as many acquisitions as possible. That means always checking to see whether the rents at the property can support any debt at all, while also looking for below-market rate debt, including in the form of program-related investments from foundations.
Although program-related investments have been around since 1968, relatively few foundations have yet to take up the practice — but they are growing in numbers. In this case, it was the first ever program-related investment for both the WHH Foundation and LA Más.
“We had a prior grantee relationship with WHH Foundation for eight years,” Leung says. “They had started exploring program-related investments on their own and we ended up as the guinea pig.”
Another $40,000 grant came in from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. LA Más and Self-Help successfully closed escrow for Hancock Street in the spring of 2025.
Over the summer, a member of the LA Más community governance committee flagged another potential acquisition. On Chapman Street in Glassell Park, the 40 residents of a 12-unit apartment building had spent more than a year resisting voluntary buyout offers to vacate their units from potential buyers of their building.
Also known as “cash for keys,” such offers are one of the tactics used to flip a rent-stabilized building into market-rate units. The building’s corporate landlord had entered escrow with a buyer who wanted to secure cash-for-keys commitments from current residents before closing on the purchase.
After convincing the corporate landlord to exit escrow with the other buyer, Leung opened escrow for the Chapman Street building on Sept. 16, 2025.
For a $2.1 million acquisition and rehab, Self-Help Ventures Fund came in with $1.7 million as an 80% joint-owner with LA Más. For her end of the deal, Leung got another $300,000 program-related investment from the WHH Foundation. LA Más and Self-Help closed escrow for Chapman Street two months later.
It’s starting to feel like a routine, Leung says. Identify a potential acquisition. Get a joint-venture partner on board. Open escrow. Find the rest of the money. Close. Rinse and repeat.
“We’ve definitely had conversations with other CDFIs who are interested in doing real estate development,” Quinn says. “I would say the Self-Help model of doing things is not easily replicable because it’s come about in a unique way over many years.”
Managing with residents
Passed in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act is a landmark federal anti-redlining law that requires banks to meet the credit needs of low- and moderate-income communities. One of the ways banks can meet those obligations is by investing in CDFIs like Self-Help Ventures Fund.
Enabled by its scale and decades of experience doing mission-driven real estate development, Self-Help Ventures Fund has raised patient, long-term capital from banks on terms that make these joint-venture deals pencil out. But it still has to get those dollars back to its investors, along with a modest return. That means Self-Help has to carefully scrutinize the ability of its local partners like LA Más to manage its joint-venture investments.
After acquiring a property, LA Más meets with tenants to start figuring out how they want their buildings to run. All of a building’s tenants might want to serve on a building’s resident committee, especially in smaller buildings — or maybe they would prefer a smaller group taking on that responsibility. They might want to meet every month, or maybe as little as once a year.
“Our work I would say is part of the social housing movement in LA,” Leung says. “We’re not a purist in terms of residents needing to become owners, which would make it so much harder to finance. We’re upfront about not spending our energy doing that because what our residents are asking for is stability and affordability.”
Residents and staff during a resident meeting at the Chapman Street building. (Photo by Gina Clyne)
LA Más maintains flexibility in how each building’s tenants want to govern themselves, but it makes sure residents of each property have a say over major decisions like adding market-rate units or ADUs, which can help their properties achieve financial sustainability while preserving affordability for existing, often long-tenured residents. For Self-Help, resident involvement in governance this way supports a project’s financial stability.
“The governance aspect of it supports our investment, rather than being something that others might look at as a hindrance to operating the property,” Quinn says. “Now you have tenants who are actively engaged in the property, they feel ownership, they feel pride in their community, they feel connected to the others around them. And to LA Más, I think that mitigates some issues that you may run into with tenants down the road.”
Working closely with residents has already proven crucial for navigating complicated situations, like when a second-floor tenant at the Chapman Street property moved out just after LA Más closed escrow in November. That tenant happened to be paying the highest rent in the building at the time.
After renovating the vacated unit, LA Más offered it first to existing building residents. A first-floor tenant took up the offer, while also requesting a $300 rent reduction so she could reduce her workload cleaning houses as a senior. Meanwhile, a great-grandmother on the second floor of the walkup building was also in need of a wheelchair-accessible unit. After the first-floor tenant moved into the newly-renovated unit at the reduced rent, LA Más converted her former unit to a wheelchair-accessible apartment for the great-grandmother.
LA Más then renovated the great grandmother’s former second floor unit and the nonprofit listed it at market-rate for $1,800 a month. That’s nearly twice the average rent for the rest of the building, but it allowed the rent reduction that the original first-floor tenant had needed.
“The people who moved into the market rate unit know the story behind why they’re the people with the market-rate unit,” Leung says. “In most luxury apartment buildings, there’s often just a handful of units that are affordable and you’re living amongst a sea of market rate units, but now this is the reverse.”
Finding new money: Public dollars and community investments
Quinn anticipates Self-Help will stick around as a joint-venture partner for now. But not forever.
“I don’t think the vision is for Self-Help and LA Más to own every property together for all time,” Quinn says. “I think they’re going to be able to do this many times over after we’re no longer purchasing all these properties together. And I wouldn’t say we would only ever work with [LA Más]. There are other organizations we’d love to work with as well [in this way].”
Self-Help’s balance sheet and track record helped LA Más to access its first public dollars.
Not long after closing on the Chapman Street acquisition, the same corporate landlord approached LA Más with another opportunity. Around the block, on Drew Street, the corporation owned two more neighboring buildings with a total of 31 units. It was thinking of putting them on the market, but was impressed with LA Más’s ability to close successfully on the earlier deal at the market price, and wanted to gauge the nonprofit’s interest in taking these two properties off its hands.
Residents and LA Más staff at the inspection of the Drew Street property. (Photo courtesy LA Más)
LA Más was interested, but this time Leung negotiated for six months to close — anticipating that LA Más would be going after its first public dollars.
The LA County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA) was created in 2022 with the passage of legislation championed by a regional coalition of housing, labor, and environmental justice advocates as well as homeless service providers. Funded by a countywide half-cent sales tax, LACAHSA has the power to provide long-term, flexible, relatively low-interest loans and grants for both new construction and preservation of existing affordable housing.
As Leung expected, LACAHSA’s first application window for developers opened shortly after the new year. The new agency received 127 applicants, requesting a total of $1.5 billion – far more than the $200 million available. In April, the agency announced its first 10 winners. LA Más was one of them — and the first to focus on preservation, not new construction.
“LACAHSA wouldn’t have underwritten LA Más alone,” Leung says. “We would not have qualified under their criteria. We needed a development partner saying ‘we believe in you and we’re going to go to bat for you,’ and that’s what Self-Help did.”
LACAHSA awarded a combined $7 million for the LA Más joint-venture with Self-Help to acquire the Drew Street buildings. Most of it, $5 million, came in the form of a below-market rate loan with a conventional monthly repayment schedule. Another million came in a subordinated loan, meaning it has more flexible and patient repayment terms. The last million came as a grant that required the joint-venture to raise another million in matching funds.
Self-Help chipped in just $500,000 this time for a 50% ownership share of Drew Street. For her end of the deal, Leung got creative.
LA Más raised its first ever direct loans from individual community investors. At a minimum investment of $25,000, community investors loaned LA Más a total of $200,000, all at one-percent interest over a five-year term. The community investments are unsecured loans directly to the nonprofit, so they’re not tied to the buildings as collateral. LA4LA also chipped in again, this time with a $250,000 program-related investment. Donations covered the rest.
Quinn believes it’s important that LA Más isn’t set on any one particular way of doing things. How much ownership LA Más shares with a joint venture partner, the sources of capital it taps into for any given acquisition, even the exact way in which LA Más involves residents in making decisions about their buildings — it’s all up for discussion with each opportunity to acquire a building. “They’re fixed on the outcome of preserving units for residents and helping people stay rooted in the community,” Quinn says.
LA Más is now turning to community investors to help it take more buildings off the speculative market and protect what’s left of working-class residents in northeast LA. After raising $13 million to acquire 54 units over the past two years, LA Más has set a goal of raising $25 million to acquire another 90 or more units over the next two years.
Leung doesn’t anticipate all $25 million will come from community investors. The more that can come in the form of donations or grants, the better. But Leung sees no reason to limit her fundraising to grants, program-related investments, or public dollars.
“So much wealth is in the hands of people who don’t have great intentions doing housing real estate,” Leung says. “If we have good intentions and we’re smart and creative, we can figure it out.”
