Brick by brick
Newly retired, Duncan Barrett looks back on career in affordable living
When Duncan Barrett started his career in affordable housing, the term wasn’t in use yet, and the funding structure used to finance much of the housing for people with low incomes hadn’t yet been invented.
Barrett graduated from RPI in 1969 with a degree in systems engineering. His job after college was at a steel company. But the work didn’t mesh with his youthful idealism, he says — but building homes for people who were poor did. He made affordable housing his life’s work. Now 75, Barrett is retiring, leaving behind his latest role as the president of Beacon Communities, a job he started in 2016.
Barrett left the steel company for the Troy Rehabilitation
and Improvement Program, founded in 1968 by one of Barrett’s classmates at RPI in an effort to help inner-city residents own their homes. Barrett says the early years illustrated how housing was built before tax credits.
“We used charitable donations and conventional borrowing — money we really couldn’t afford to pay back — to rehabilitate vacant row houses. It was gratifying,” Barrett said. “We restored buildings and then turned them over to people who otherwise would not have been homeowners. We created about 200 units in my eight years there.”
The Community Development Act went into effect in 1976 and changed the business. It allowed states and some local municipalities to use a portion of HUD funding to rehabilitate housing, rebuild sidewalks and pay for other neighborhood improvement projects. Troy hired TRIP as a consultant
to do neighborhood and grassroots planning. Barrett was a single dad at the time. It was a 15-hour-a-day job, 70 hours a week, Barrett remembers. Eventually he burned out.
In the 1980s and ’90s he opened a consulting business and did small-scale developments. It was during this time another policy change radically changed affordable housing. The low-income housing credit was enacted in 1986, creating a publicprivate partnership for affordable housing construction. It did two things, Barrett says. First, it took government out of the role of regulator.
“If you look at the government-funded affordable housing portfolio, the buildings were built to an acceptable standard for the time. The expectation for useful life was 30 years and there was no plan for the end. Managing housing is not something any unit of government does well.”
The tax credit also gave private banks incentive to pay for housing — in exchange for a break on their federal taxes. The investor, however, has a liability of 15 years when they have to make sure the building is maintained and the regulations met.
If it’s not, Barrett explained, the IRS can recapture the tax credits and even go back in time and penalize the investor for underpaying taxes.
“If JP Morgan comes to a project they invested in and they see a flower bed isn’t weeded, they send us a letter,” Barrett said. “Maybe HUD wouldn’t see it as an issue of health and safety, but it’s an indication of long-term viability.”
Public-private partnerships opened the door to some of Barrett’s proudest work: rehabilitating public housing. He did several, but points to Kennedy Tower in Troy as an example. It was poorly designed and lacked access for wheelchairs. At the time Barrett and his team took over, vacancy was 35 percent although there were people in Troy who needed homes. Kennedy has a bad reputation and they didn’t want to live there.
“When we finished in 2005, it was light, warm and air-conditioned, and out from under the counter-productive regime of public housing,” Barrett says.
Before going to Beacon, Barrett was at Omni Development, founded in 1973.
Jolie Milstein, president and CEO of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, describes Barrett as great ambassador for affordable housing. He’s good at explaining wonky policy to legislators who are new to it; he can relate to any legislator given where they are geographically, Milstein said.
He’s also convincing in an unassuming way, she said. It was Barrett who convinced her to take the role at the state affordable housing association seven years ago after she turned down the job and said she wanted to continue as a developer.
“After 15 minutes I’d agreed to be interviewed and go through the process, Milstein said.
Last week, as Barrett worked to tie up loose ends, the association presented him with a lifetime achievement award.
As proud as he is of much of his work, Barrett also readily admits to mistakes. He led the charge for the Uncle Sam parking garage in 1977, a problematic structure for the city of Troy.
“I said in meetings it would pay for itself. It didn’t. I was foolish, ignorant and naive.”
Barrett said he didn't expect to retire,
but he's enjoying it. He's taking a class "from a university that wouldn't have accepted me 55 years ago," in green energy and spending more time with his family. He's not done with his life's work, however. He's now a volunteer for NYSAFAH, as a policy advocate.