Priya Jayachandran took a winding path to where she is now.
The CEO of D.C. affordable housing nonprofit National Housing Trust previously spent more than 15 years at some of the country’s biggest banks, where she worked with community partners on lending projects such as Columbia Height’s D.C. USA development before joining the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to work on its multifamily housing programs.
It was there she discovered a love of working on affordable housing; it was “something you could touch and you could impact,” she says.
She’s been at NHT for nearly six years. Under her guidance, the nonprofit has doubled in size in terms of budget and staff — to around $11 million and 55 employees, respectively.
NHT has grown a lot in your time leading the organization. How did you achieve that as a nonprofit? We really had a lot of programs and we were pretty small, so a lot of the growth has been less launching new things, but really expanding the impact of the things that we do well. Our real estate development platform, our ownership [of affordable buildings] has grown, our lending has doubled, maybe tripled in the last six years, both in staff and the size of the portfolio. And our community outreach and impact or resident services team that works with the residents in our in our properties, doubled.
Why should Greater Washington’s business community want to increase the stock of affordable housing? Time after time, we’ve shown that somebody who’s making minimum wage, even at our elevated minimum wage here in the DMV, cannot afford the median priced cost of housing. I’m not asking anyone to care about it for the social reasons, but because it affects your bottom line. If your employees can’t afford to live here, they’re going to move. If we want our downtowns to be more vibrant, it’s going to require people coming back. And in order for people to come back, they need to be able to build their lives here.
You’re working with Amazon.com Inc. on a recently announced $40 million program to boost home ownership for low- and middle-income families in Greater Washington, Seattle and Nashville. What will that look like? What we wanted to do with Amazon was strengthen those organizations that are doing affordable housing through capacity building — so offering operating grants, and then there’s technical assistance available through another partner. And then once you have new projects, then we’ll provide affordable loans to help these groups develop those projects.
What’s your favorite way to recharge? I’ve got three kids — for better or for worse, they don’t let you take yourself too seriously. And I like to exercise. I’m not a morning person, but I kind of have to pretend I am some mornings a week, because there’s no other choice.
What are your hobbies? My happy place is backpacking.
What’s something that most folks wouldn’t know about you? I’m an introvert but I play an extrovert by day. My career ambitions have forced me and so it’s not hard — I enjoy doing it. But when I’m not working, I just like to curl up with a book or not talk for a large part of the day. And I speak middling Italian — my husband was raised in Rome and exclusively speaks Italian to our kids.
Any other fun facts that we should know about you? This is random, but my last name should have been Toke. Kind of a typical immigrant story — when my dad was coming into this country, his name got transposed. He was Jayachandran Toke and in the paperwork, it became Toke Jayachandran.
The basics
Priya Jayachandran, CEO, National Housing Trust
- Age: 54
- Residence: AU Park
- Education: Bachelor’s in biochemistry at the University of California San Diego; master’s in public policy at Princeton University
- Family: Husband Jakub and children Toby, 20, Nina, 17, and Sybil, 12
- First job: Babysitting and working at a salad shop in Salinas, California
