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Staff and Board
Staff
Patty Rose, Executive Director
Board
STAFF
Patty Rose, Executive Director
Patty is an experienced leader in the field of design for public service. As the Executive Director of Greenspace she creates and leads partnerships that integrate efforts from the development community and advocacy organizations to create more vibrant communities through the creation of affordable green housing and green neighborhoods. Her leadership efforts contributed to creating and passing the DC Green Building Act in 2006 and she is now focused on its successful implementation as a mayoral appointee to the DC Green Building Advisory Council.
She has previously been Assistant Director for an experimental College of Design, Art and Architecture in Santa Monica, CA. Patty also served as Special Assistant to the Executive Director and the Deputy Secretary of the Board of Commissioners for the regional transportation and development agency in St. Louis, MO during construction of the city's light rail system. She holds a degree in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.
BOARD
Christopher VanArsdale, Chair
Chris VanArsdale is Managing Partner of Heleos Co., a development firm focused on affordable and sustainable multifamily housing, with numerous net-zero and near-net-zero energy projects under development, including the largest multifamily residential solar array the Washington Metro region. Chris has more than 18 years of real estate development, legal, tax credit finance and project management experience and has developed and/or owned approximately 400 multi-family and single-family dwellings in the Washington metro region.
From 2008-2013 he served as Executive Director of the Canal Park Development Association, Inc. (a non-profit, public-private development agency affiliated with WC Smith & Co.). He directed the $27 million development of the Washington Canal Park and surrounding infrastructure and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. The public park is surrounded by mixed-use buildings, contains a LEED Gold certified restaurant, seasonal ice-rink, and is an innovative demonstration model for neighborhood-scale stormwater and green-building systems.
Chris was an appointee to DC’s Department of Energy and Environment Deep Green for Affordable Housing Technical Advisory Group. He was also a mayoral appointee to the DC Sustainable Energy Utility Advisory Board and has served as an advisor to the DC Property Assessed Clean Energy Program.
He was an attorney in the Washington DC offices of Arent Fox, Greenberg Traurig, and Akin Gump, specializing in environmental law and brownfields redevelopment.
In 2018, the City First Foundation awarded Chris its Community Builder Award for work to create and preserve quality affordable housing. He is a frequent panelist and presenter at conferences and Urban Land Institute webinars.
He has a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, a master's in environmental management and resource economics from Duke University, and a law degree from Cornell Law School.
Matt Hoffman, Treasurer
HousingTech Ventures, Managing Partner
Matt founded HousingTech Ventures to advise and invest in early-stage companies with innovative, tech-enabled solutions that have the prospect to increase housing affordability, availability, and attainability.
With over 20 years’ experience building businesses in the housing and technology sectors, Matt previously served as Vice President of Innovation for Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., a national real estate financial services platform serving the affordable housing sector. In that role, he built an investment portfolio of HousingTech companies and led the launch of an online impact investing brokerage.
His previous experiences include serving as a policy advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and running a federal interagency taskforce on e-commerce; providing business strategy and policy consulting to high-tech and startup companies as Vice President of E-commerce at Infotech Strategies; and co-founding and running a real estate development company in Baltimore, Maryland.
He currently serves as an UrbanTech advisor to Dreamit Ventures, an Ivory Innovations Fellow, and a member of the Selection Committee for the Housing Lab at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Matt has served on numerous non-profit boards and currently chairs the real estate finance committee of Benedictine Programs & Services, which helps children and adults with developmental disabilities achieve their greatest potential and is undergoing a $40 million campus transformation.
He is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (MPP) and Brown University (BA).