PermAffai

Permanent Affordability. Applied AI.

We work with local governments, housing nonprofits, and mission-driven developers to build programs that keep homes affordable, and the systems that keep them that way.

What we do

Six ways to start

Free The Long Dollar See what one subsidy dollar does over thirty years in your own market. About four minutes, and it prints. $3,500 Portfolio Review The same analysis across every home you hold, up to 50, and which restrictions expire when. $7,000 Feasibility Screen Whether a program makes sense where you are, on real numbers rather than assumptions. $24,700 Feasibility Study The decision document, with a recommendation in it and the evidence behind it. from $995 AI Readiness Where your organization stands with AI, and the risks to fix before any tool touches resident data. from $7,000 Stuard Companion Your formula, procedures and calendar, standing up as something staff can ask.

Not sure which, or whether any of it applies to you? That is what the call is for.

Book a call
01 Try It

One subsidy dollar. Thirty years. Two very different answers.

Put your own market's numbers in and watch what happens to a single subsidy dollar over three decades — how many households it serves when the subsidy stays with the home, against what it does when it comes back at the first sale and has to be spent again at tomorrow's prices.

It is free, it needs no account, and the whole thing runs in your browser. At the end it prints an exhibit with your organization's name on it, which is the part people take into funder meetings and council chambers.

Built for the people who have to make the case: housing staff, CLT directors, funders, and the elected officials they answer to.

If you already hold homes, the same analysis run across your whole portfolio — including expiring restrictions by address — is the Portfolio Review, $3,500.

Open The Long Dollar
02 The Firm

AI-augmented tools, systems and services to scale impact, not replace people.

PermAffai works with the organizations holding the line on permanent affordability: the cities and counties that fund it, the community land trusts and nonprofits that steward it, and the developers who build it.

Matthew Wyman brings over a decade across permanent affordability, public-sector program administration and nonprofit technical assistance, plus real estate investment experience and senior development-finance capacity. Every system we build is meant to extend the practitioner, never to stand in for them. Where we build with AI, it is built on Claude.

Our work is rooted in community wealth building. We help organizations reach capital that does not currently reach them, and we build the operating capacity that lets them hold what they have built. Nothing we design ships without the education that makes it usable by the people who depend on it.

Ensure a legacy of affordability that outlives those who built it.

03 What We Do

Five lines of work. Most engagements start with one and grow into another.

01 Technical Assistance

You need a program that still works in year twenty.

Program and policy design, feasibility studies, program guidelines and operating procedures, resale and affordability documents built to your funding conditions, and the staff training that makes them usable. Four ways in, starting with a free tool and a $7,000 feasibility screen and running up to a complete program build.

Read more → 02 Fractional Leadership

You need senior capacity you cannot afford to hire.

Embedded executive capacity. We take a seat inside the organization and carry decisions, not recommendations. Three levels, from standing counsel to running the organization until you are ready to hire.

Read more → 03 Stewardship Systems

Nobody can calculate a resale price without digging through a decade of files.

Formula-locked calculators your organization owns, monitoring calendars and checklists, compliance report review, and homeowner records that stay findable long after the people who created them have moved on.

We are also forming a founding cohort to measure what stewardship actually takes, and the interest list is open.

Read more → 04 Development Advisory

You have a project to build and the capital stack does not close.

Low-Income Housing Tax Credit structuring, bond financing, layered soft funding, feasibility and entitlement pathway, capital stack structuring, underwriting review, and construction oversight.

Read more → 05 Training

Your next stewardship director has nowhere to learn this.

Two courses are in construction: a stewardship director program, and a shorter course on using AI in housing nonprofit operations. Join the list and we will tell you when they open.

Read more →
04 How This Gets Paid For

Many organizations already hold money that can pay for this.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act changed what federal law requires of a community land trust, and both sides of the table now have work to do about it. A jurisdiction has to decide what goes into the next program it writes. An organization has to check what its own documents are carrying against a definition that moved — usually to confirm it already clears the new floor, and to decide what it now wants to say about governance that the law no longer requires.

Neither question usually appears as a line item in anyone's budget. Both are usually an eligible use of money the organization already holds. People often do not know which source applies, or that consultant costs are eligible at all, so finding the source is part of early scoping rather than something that waits for a budget conversation.

HOME Investment Partnerships Program
Two routes, depending on which side of the table you sit. Administration and planning funds are held by participating jurisdictions and state HOME programs, and pay for program design, resale and recapture policy, written agreements, and affordability-period monitoring. CHDO operating funds are awarded by a participating jurisdiction to a certified Community Housing Development Organization and go to operating capacity rather than to projects. The pool is small — up to 5 percent of a jurisdiction’s annual HOME allocation (24 CFR 92.208) — and what counts within it is a decision between the organization and its jurisdiction. We help you ask the question against your own written agreement. We do not tell your funder what qualifies.
Community Development Block Grant planning and administration funds
Held by entitlement communities and state programs. Pays for housing studies, feasibility work, policy and ordinance development, program design, and program monitoring.
HUD Section 4 Capacity Building
A federal appropriation administered through national intermediaries. Pays for capacity building and technical assistance to local organizations.
Capacity-building grants
Private and community foundations, and the national networks that make grants to their own members — NeighborWorks America and Habitat for Humanity among them. Usually the most accessible source for a smaller organization, and frequently the fastest.
State and local funds
Housing trust funds are the best known, but rarely the only option. General revenue, program income, bond proceeds and dedicated local revenue all show up here. This is usually the most flexible money available and the most commonly overlooked.
Your own operating budget
Sometimes the right answer. We will say so when it is.

We are never the applicant for grant funds. We serve awardees as a paid technical partner. Caps and eligibility are confirmed against your own program documents during discovery and cited in the proposal.

05 Where We're Going · Community Capital

The future of permanent affordability.

Promises that outlive us

A promise that stays with a home is a promise about the year 2100. Today that promise is kept by people. Someone has to remember the formula, find the file, run the calculation, send the notice. In a staffed organization that is a stewardship or compliance director. Where the role is shared across a small team, the same work still has to happen on schedule — and whether it does comes down to a title company noticing the restriction and reaching someone who knows the program.

Where somebody is doing that work, it shows. At the end of 2010 — the deepest broad-based test the model has faced — 1.30% of mortgages held by community land trust homeowners were seriously delinquent, against 8.57% in the conventional market, and 0.46% were in foreclosure proceedings against 4.63%. Six to ten times better, on homes held by low- and moderate-income buyers compared against market owners at every income level. Four out of five seriously delinquent CLT homeowners kept their home or sold it with the trust’s help.

That is not the restriction doing the work. It is somebody watching, and stepping in early.

Thaden, E. (2011). Stable home ownership in a turbulent economy. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 62 community land trusts, 3,143 mortgages; market rates from the Mortgage Bankers Association National Delinquency Survey.

The intention itself can be built into the structure. The formula, the affordability period, the conditions a future sale has to satisfy: set once, carried forward, still true long after everyone who signed has moved on.

That is not a replacement for stewards. It is what lets a small staff steward a large portfolio without anything falling through, and what protects a program that has no staff at all.

Ownership that reaches the block

Ask who owns your block. In most neighborhoods the honest answer is: someone else. The building, the storefront, the land under both, held somewhere far away by people who will never stand on that corner.

There is no structural reason it has to work that way. A community can hold a real position in the housing and commercial space around it. Not a symbolic seat at a table, an actual share. Small enough that an ordinary household can hold one. Real enough that when the block does well, the people who made it do well.

The tools that carry this weight are getting simpler every year. The barrier was never the idea.

This is a direction, not a product. Nothing here is an offering.

What exists today

The structures that would let a community hold a real position in what it builds are still forming. The work we can do right now is narrower and more practical: helping an organization understand what it is actually financeable for, and fixing what stands between it and a partner who would write the check.

That work sits inside Development Advisory, where the deal economics live.

06 Start a Conversation

What are you working on?

Tell us the problem in whatever shape it is currently in. We will follow up to talk through what actually fits, and say so plainly if it is not us.

Practice

National practice. Available for engagements coast to coast.

No mailing list. We reply to what we can help with.