For Koo, a similar passion took longer to develop. In 1979, while she was teaching ESL classes in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York, fair housing issues were serendipitously working their way into her life. “The set of issues I was dealing with weren’t education- or job-related,” says Koo, who led Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), a New York-based affordable housing and social services provider. “It was housing. It was, ‘How do I get heat and hot water provided by the landlord?’”
After repeatedly taking landlords to court and hearing time and again that they weren’t getting enough in rent to make necessary capital improvements to the dilapidated housing of her clients, Koo decided to take matters into her own hands. “After seeing buildings burn because people had to use electrical heaters, we decided this is enough,” Koo says. “We can either keep organizing rent strikes and hauling landlords to court, or we can build housing.”
So in 1985, Koo took a trip to Columbia, seeking out the funds needed to build affordable housing in New York from none other than Enterprise—then a smaller organization leading a national effort to create the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). [Editor’s note: LIHTC was signed into law with the passage of the 1986 Tax Reform Act.] Rouse, the larger-than-life real estate chieftain from Easton, Md., met personally with Koo, the petite activist from Hong Kong. Little did he know that 22 years later she would be leading the organization he founded. “I thought of Jim as one of us when I first met him,” Koo says. “He was a social entrepreneur in his thinking. Being a person of deep religious faith, he cared deeply about the community.”
