Gene Slater
Gene Slater is the founding principal of CSG Advisors, the nation’s leading financial advisor for affordable housing according to Securities Data over the last 20 years. In this capacity, he led the firm’s work for more than half of the state housing finance agencies and 50 largest U.S. cities, including financing housing for more than 1 million families.
Gene has specialized for 45 years in structuring and negotiating major public-private development projects, overall financial sustainability strategies for public agencies, and local, state and national efforts to increase long-term affordability.
His and the firm’s work began — from a rented farmhouse 20 miles from the nearest xerox machine in La Crosse Wisconsin — by designing Pittsburgh’s home improvement bond loan program which renovated 18,000 of the city’s 72,000 single-family homes, became HUD’s national model for local rehabilitation programs, and he then helped implement for major cities across the country.
He has been a national leader in homeownership programs, including many innovative downpayment assistance programs. He helped design the largest shared appreciation loan programs for first-time homebuyers — from San Francisco in 1982 to California’s Dream for All Program in 2023.
In the multi-family area, he helped structure the two largest Low Income Housing Tax Credit raises in the history of the program — for modernizing 33 public housing projects in Puerto Rico and federalizing and improving 21,000 public housing units for the New York City Housing Authority. He served as the Resolution Trust Corporation’s national financial advisor on all tax-exempt assets from former savings and loans, including 800 multi-family developments.
In the depth of the financial crisis, Gene helped design what became U.S. Treasury’s New Issue Bond Program that financed 110,000 homes for 1st time buyers and 40,000 affordable rental units.
He serves as a senior advisor to the state housing finance agencies of Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York, and has helped design programs and major developments for many of the country’s largest cities.
Gene advised on San Francisco’s Ferry Building and Mission Bay, Washington D.C.’s Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, Southwest Waterfront (“The Wharf”) and Housing Production Trust Fund; the affordability agreement for re-use of Denver’s Stapleton Airport; and Anaheim’s 7 years of successful financial negotiations with The Walt Disney Company leading to $1.5 billion of public-private investments without risk to the City. This work led to his conducting the Urban Land Institute’s first national webinairs on structuring public private partnerships.
Gene has a Master’s in City Planning from MIT, a BA from Columbia University summa cum laude, held a traveling fellowship to the London School of Economics, and recently completed a Master’s in Liberal Arts from Stanford. During his Loeb Fellowship he studied capital markets for housing at the Harvard Business School and created MIT and Harvard’s first joint seminars on public-private partnerships.
His 2021 book, “Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America” is the first narrative history of the real estate industry’s invention of residential segregation and — in order to defend segregation against the Civil Rights Movement — the modern conservative vision of American freedom.
He created and conducted the American Institute of Architects’ first national webinair on the history of housing segregation, His projects have won numerous national awards.
In response to hedge funds buying up single-family homes and limiting choices for first-time homebuyers, he helped initiate The Stop Predatory Investing Act, introduced by the Chairs of Senate Finance and Senate Banking, with support from many Loeb Fellows.
He is beginning to work on what may be a book on “Unlearning as the Key to Positively Transforming Cities, Places and the Self”.
Gene has two sons, both high school teachers in the Bay Area, and is married to Ayse Dogan.