New vp at Housing Partnership Network.

Leslie Steen, the President and CEO of a top District of Columbia metro area nonprofit, has taken a leadership position with the Boston-based Housing Partnership Network, a peer network and business cooperative of eighty of the most accomplished affordable housing nonprofits in the nation.

Steen, who has led Community Preservation and Development Corporation since its inception in 1989, will serve as the Network's new Vice President for Policy and Business Development, beginning November 1st.

Based in a new Washington, D.C. office, Steen will oversee the research and policy efforts currently under way, deepen the Network's role in peer-to-peer exchange and play a leading role in development.

"We are delighted and lucky to have Leslie join our team. She has extensive on-the-ground experience in creating innovative public private partnerships to build communities and affordable homes for working families. She brings a deep understanding of how practitioners and policy makers can work together to achieve greater impact," said Tom Bledsoe, President of the Housing Partnership Network.

At the Housing Partnership Network, Leslie Steen will head up a new policy and research initiative, conducted in collaboration with Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and the Urban Institute, to assess the impact and business models of the more sophisticated partnership-based nonprofit housing organizations in the United States that comprise the Network. She will help identify the systemic barriers to the growth and impact of these organizations and lead a national advocacy effort to promote policy, financing and regulatory changes that will create a stronger and more effective nonprofit housing sector.

In addition, the vice president will deepen the Network's role in peer to peer exchange among entrepreneurial nonprofits and promote business development to expand the mission impact of the membership and Network.

Before CPDC, Steen was Director of Portfolio Finance with National Housing Partnership (NHP), the largest owner of multifamily housing in the country, where she developed tax-credit-eligible projects for low-income housing and worked with lenders and HUD to refinance troubled properties. Steen has extensive market-rate housing experience in project management, syndication, construction, and marketing, much of it in challenging, inner city neighborhoods.

Under Steen's leadership, CPDC has become renowned for successful efforts to restore large housing complexes and improve the quality of life in communities that had fallen victim to job loss, poor management, and crime--including violence and a pervasive drug trade.

Steen said her decision to leave CPDC, which is a member of the Housing Partnership Network, was a difficult one.