‘When You Know Better, You Do Better’

Danielle Arigoni never imagined the day when housing would be both a topic of national conversation and a point of contention in her own community outside Washington, D.C.

"The term affordability kind of got thrown around, both in support of and in opposition to land use reform," said Arigoni about the community dialogues on missing-middle housing in her Arlington, Virginia neighborhood. "It felt like the water had become very muddied in terms of achieving affordability through land use and zoning reform."

As vice president of housing supply at Enterprise Community Partners, Arigoni is playing a central role in helping clarify both the field's affordability challenges and opportunities for solving them, while driving innovative solutions backed by research and best practice.

Whenever we set up goals as being in conflict with one another, it eliminates the opportunity to think about how to achieve them together.

Danielle Arigoni

To this work, Arigoni brings a rich 25-year career spanning housing, aging, resilience, and international development. As an author, speaker, and connector, her clear-eyed, glass-half-full perspective draws on early inspiration from Enterprise cofounder James Rouse.

Five months into her new role, we spoke to Arigoni about how her background and expertise inform her current role, why we need a holistic solution to increase housing supply, and why there's never been a better time to advance this critical issue.

What lessons emerged from the housing debate playing out in your own community?

For me, it was proof that when you know better, you do better. And that we need to carry out land use reform with a clear commitment to delivering affordability, because it can get lost in the process.

At Enterprise, we can't lose this moment. As zoning and land use reforms advance across the country, we must ensure that they increase the supply of affordable housing.

Affordability can be a nebulous and contentious term, so it's sometimes called "attainable" or "workforce." It's a complex challenge, and organizations like Enterprise can help guide the conversation and ensure equitable outcomes.

Housing is at a pivotal moment in the nation. What are your top priorities in this new role?

One thing that has surprised me is the breadth and depth of housing supply work underway across Enterprise - from transit-oriented development and policy research to our land use cohorts and Faith-Based Development Initiative^SM.

The real opportunity is to harmonize that work to strengthen our advocacy, advisory work, and ability to replicate solutions at scale.

Passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing bill has already injected enthusiasm and energy into the work of delivering affordable housing and expanding supply. Beyond having the potential to provide new resources for innovative land use reform, the legislation compels new research on what works that will shape the practice for years to come.

As our CEO Shaun Donovan said, it's an incredible start to what will be a long journey at all levels of government to mobilize resources, accelerate innovative solutions, and ultimately build the homes we need in ways that benefit everyone.

You've talked about the risk of false choices between growth, affordability, and inclusion. How can communities move beyond those perceived trade-offs?

Whenever we set up goals as being in conflict with one another, it eliminates the opportunity to think about how to achieve them together. When I was at the EPA, we asked the question: can you have smart growth and preserve affordable housing? Can you boost transit-oriented infill development without displacing residents? The answer to both is yes.

Today, we have ample evidence from Enterprise and its partners that communities can achieve both. Green building is a great example. Affordable or green? It's often presented as a false choice. We've got 242,000 units that we've certified to Enterprise Green Communities that prove you can achieve both.

It's not enough to just build four walls and a roof. You have to bring a multidisciplinary mindset to housing that considers how people live in their community, too. That is the throughline for me. Housing intersects with transportation, infrastructure, the environment, health, education, and resilience. Meeting that challenge and ensuring people and places thrive for the long term requires a holistic approach.

Are Enterprise's land use network and forum initiatives the right tools for this moment?

Absolutely. The Land Use Network is incredibly timely, and it was forward-thinking for Enterprise to invest in it. Working deeply in up to 15 communities is going to surface some really interesting solutions.

And with all the recent activity and interest at the state level, it's important for us to play a role through the State Leaders Land Use Forum. We've already seen state leaders take on the difficult challenge of harmonizing housing policy in their states, and we want to help them go further.

Land use reform is such a complex process. No place gets it right just out of the gate. Being able to play an up-front role to ensure states and localities deliver affordability through their reforms is a hugely important opportunity.

In your book, Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation, you explored the intersection of aging, housing, and climate. What drew you to that work?

At HUD, I worked on climate resilience post-Superstorm Sandy under then-Secretary Donovan. I took that resilience frame with me to AARP, where I learned that, disaster after disaster, older adults die at disproportionately higher rates than the rest of the population.

It was something that I couldn't quite dislodge from my brain, and it pushed me to explore how we could rethink housing and community investments to strengthen resilience for older adults.

When I left AARP, I sat down to pull it all together, in part because I saw that the people I had worked with in the resilience world were very different than the people I worked with in the aging world. They come out of different disciplines and are governed by different federal regulations, expectations, and funding sources.

In some ways, my book was designed to provide a roadmap for the aging and resilience worlds to find one another by establishing some common ground - ultimately leading to more collaboration. There's still a ton of work to do. But it's been exciting to see more interest and recognition of the need for to focus on how climate impacts older adults.

There's so much opportunity here at Enterprise, too. I was thrilled to learn about the innovative investments already happening in housing for older adults, made possible by our Thome Aging Well Program.

You've said that joining Enterprise feels like a full circle moment, especially because you studied Jim Rouse's work in graduate school.

I was inspired by Jim Rouse's vision of mixed-income, diverse, walkable communities and his belief in the power of a bold vision to fuel hope.

Imagine converting - over time, not overnight - neighborhoods currently comprised wholly of single-family homes into communities with a lot of different housing typologies, including but not limited to single-family homes, that serve a broad array of incomes, ages, and household compositions. To me, that's a pretty bold vision, and it's also achievable.

Every new development opportunity is a step in that direction. At the same time, the pressure to build more housing quickly means we may miss the chance to go beyond the status quo. Enterprise is well-positioned to help guide and lead communities so that we capitalize on the opportunities to create more diverse and affordable housing options for people.

It's what Jim Rouse would have asked of us and it leverages all our capabilities - our development expertise, our thought leadership, our convening power, our capital solutions. Together, those capabilities can help communities achieve that bold vision.