Equity with a Twist: A Decade of Strengthening Communities Through LIIF and JPMorganChase's Innovative Loan Product 

There are few places in Jacksonville, Florida as rich in history and culture as the Eastside neighborhood, home to historic figures like A. Philip Randolph and many important community institutions. Since 2020, community-based organization LIFT JAX has partnered with local leaders, residents and stakeholders to honor Eastside’s story and steward its revitalization from within the neighborhood.  Like too many places in recent decades, quality, affordable housing has become scarce, threatening the ability of current, new and returning residents to make their home in Eastside. It is a familiar tale in many cities around the country, but what is less familiar is the way that LIFT JAX and its partners are taking advantage of innovative solutions to address this challenge. 

When LIFT JAX sought to increase affordable homeownership opportunities in Eastside, they recognized that they needed flexible, patient capital that could advance their work over the long term. So they turned to LIIF’s Equity with a Twist (EQT) loan product to accelerate their housing strategy. The EQT seeded a capital pool to acquire vacant properties, build new homes, sell them affordably and rotate these funds several times into additional homes over the next decade. LIFT JAX is one of 17 EQT borrowers from similar organizations, totaling $12.4 million in LIIF investments since 2015. But the numbers alone do not do justice to the product’s full impact. 

Over 10 years ago, LIIF and JPMorganChase set out to design a financial product to support the work of “community quarterback” organizations like LIFT JAX. Much like a quarterback on a football team, these organizations lead collective strategy, create an integrated approach to community development across sectors like housing, health, and education, and align partners from the public and private sectors to achieve neighborhood-level impacts. This work is complex, long-term, and highly responsive to local challenges and opportunities – and therefore often hard to fund with traditional real estate project financing.  

Indeed, the EQT does not look like a traditional project loan. LIIF structured the EQT as 10-year, low-cost, enterprise-level investment directly in a community quarterback organization, supporting their long-term work in their neighborhood. While most community development loan products support one real estate project at a time, the EQT provides organizations like LIFT JAX the flexibility to direct the capital when and where it is most needed, and adapt along the way. EQTs have allowed borrowers to build their organizational capacity and sustainability, fund the quick acquisition of strategic sites for mixed-use development, and revive long-stalled projects with critical gap financing. 

LIIF’s decades-long partnership with JPMorganChase made this impact possible. Starting in 2014, JPMorganChase’s three grant investments, matched with LIIF capital, created a pool of EQT funds to pilot this product at scale and put it to work for undercapitalized communities in need.  

The EQT is a unique capital tool in the market, providing unsecured, enterprise-level capital, with a 10-year term, flexible uses and a well-below-market interest rate. Unlike more traditional loan products, borrowers utilizing the EQT can internally recycle proceeds without lender review and choose a repayment structure that best fits their capacities and needs. This structure puts borrowers in the driver’s seat, empowering them to deploy and reallocate capital to meet their community’s goals in the long run. 

It is also a case study in how LIIF looks beyond existing tools when they do not meet the needs of our borrowers and the neighborhoods they serve. LIIF’s commitment to supporting communities of opportunity, equity and well-being means investing consciously and creatively in the projects and community leaders on the ground, who are themselves invested in the area’s lasting success. 

To that end, LIIF partnered with EQT borrowers belonging to networks of organizations pursuing complex, holistic community-revitalization efforts. Two early EQT borrowers belong to Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF), a membership organization of a dozen leading nonprofit affordable housing developers. The remaining 15 EQT loans invested in organizations in the Purpose Built Communities network, which supports work in over 25 communities led by these community quarterback organizations that collaborate with local leaders and neighborhood residents to transform neighborhoods, prioritizing economic mobility and health outcomes. For Purpose Built network members, LIIF often accelerated their work by pairing the EQT with complementary tools like project loans and capital grants. 

With a 10-year track record of impact, LIIF’s EQT experience offers important learnings about how this type of flexible capital can positively impact local communities and inform the larger market.  

For LIIF, the EQT was also an early test case in using an unsecured, enterprise-level product for a programmatic purpose. LIIF has since used this model successfully to drive impact elsewhere. When provided with flexible capital, EQT borrowers deployed it creatively to address their highest needs. Overall, the EQT experience revealed where high-impact capital was needed most and how it could be structured to maximize impacts. 

The impact of the EQT extends far beyond the millions of dollars it invested in communities. Five years ago, Forest Forward was in the early stages of an ambitious plan to use the rehabilitation of its historic, 1940s-era Forest Theater as a catalyst for a broader revitalization in its South Dallas neighborhood. Around that time, they used the EQT funds to purchase a small, seemingly insignificant single-family home adjacent to the theater; however, that acquisition was, in fact, a highly consequential move for the neighborhood.   

With LIIF’s EQT investment, Forest Forward was able to act quickly to purchase and demolish this chronic nuisance property used for illicit gambling, which had long destabilized the neighborhood. This acquisition would have otherwise been hard to finance, but the flexibility of the EQT allowed Forest Forward to secure and hold this key site that had long impeded development of the blocks around the Forest Theater. Not only did this move unlock Forest Forward’s long-term revitalization plans, but it also established important credibility with the community.  

The way LIIF’s EQT product allowed community quarterbacks to make nimble and long-term investments in South Dallas and Jacksonville’s Eastside shows the importance of making capital more responsive to the needs of high-impact borrowers and supporting innovation at both the community and lender level.