Developer With a Mission
Pollack’s versatility helps nonprofits.
Many rising stars in the multifamily business have accomplished major feats. Working with cities and towns to build projects? Check. Building high-rise condos? Check. Managing numerous, geographically diverse units and properties? Check. Working with a convent of nuns to build affordable housing? Ch–wait. Maybe not, unless you’re Melinda Pollack, director of strategic initiatives for Mercy Housing, a Denver-based nonprofit that develops, operates, and finances affordable, service-enriched housing.
Need proof? Look at a recent deal she worked on. “We helped a community in Pennsylvania to assess what they should do with their convent,” Pollack says. “At the end of the day, we helped them get a low-income housing tax credit deal that had a high level of integrated support services.”
Pollack, 30, leads an arm of Mercy Housing that partners with civic and religious communities to help them understand the housing needs and related service needs in their area; plans and develops capacity; and occasionally assists them in the development process. The group also helps the eight health systems it partners with to assess communities where they sense a need for a housing response and help develop a plan to address that void. In some cases, it will also bring its health-care partners together to do advocacy work.
Pollack’s job requires both real estate expertise and policy and advocacy acumen. She certainly has the policy background. After graduating from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., she worked at the University of Pennsylvania doing student programming. A year later, she moved back to the nation’s capital and directed an AmeriCorps program in the Shaw and Columbia Heights area of the city. She started at Mercy six years ago as an intern. As she moved through the ranks, she impressed her colleagues, including her current boss, Chuck Wehrwein, a senior vice president at the organization.
When Wehrwein needed someone to go with him to a meeting with Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), he asked Pollack’s then-boss to come along. But Pollack came instead–and Wehrwein was pleasantly surprised. “I watched this young woman work and I thought, ‘Wow, I wish she worked for me,'” he says.
That wish soon came true. “A couple of years later, we had a job open and she applied for it,” Wehrwein says. “I had someone who worked for me in D.C. in mind for it, but when Melinda applied, I knew she was the right person. I had to call the other individual and apologize. I told them I found someone better.”
Though Pollack had a background in policy, she got a hands-on real estate education at Mercy’s Colorado Business Center, doing complicated tax-credit deals, HUD 202 deals, and even for-sale transactions. Add that to Pollack’s policy background, and she’s up to the challenges of all types of situations.
“She’s a very bright woman and able to bring together various elements of real estate development so that it’s not just bricks and mortar,” says Mary Anderies, a Denver-based housing consultant who has worked with Pollack. “She also brings in the people piece [of the puzzle] and the social services piece so that they make sense.”
