Co-Director of Housing Justice/Northside Neighborhood Initiative Project Manager

The Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History is seeking a full-time (32 hrs/wk) Co-Director of Housing Justice/NNI Project Manager specializing in research and land-use planning.

This role will co-lead the Housing Justice Team in the Northside Neighborhood Initiative (NNI). The NNI focuses on retaining longtime residents in three historically African American neighborhoods (Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top), attracting new residents who are invested in the community, and balancing the housing market which is currently tipped toward student rentals. The Co-Director will work alongside the Community Advocacy Specialist, The Co-Director of Housing Justice (Organizing and Advocacy), our financial partner, Self-Help Credit Union, and the Northside Compass Group.

This position will lead the Jackson Center’s efforts in land banking by managing the predevelopment process, creating financial analyses, leading project management for properties once acquired into the landbank, and researching relevant policies related to housing justice.

Currently, the Jackson Center is operating with a flexible, hybrid (in-person and remote) work environment. This role requires consistent presence in the neighborhoods requiring flexibility to include a few evening and weekend hours a month to meet the schedule and rhythm of the community.

About the Marian Cheek Jackson Center

Our mission is to honor, renew, and build community in Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top; historically Black neighborhoods in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, NC. We ally with neighbors to respond with “community-first planning”: putting community knowledge, visions, and values first in every aspect of our work. Our approach is abundance-based: believing that there are enough resources, opportunities, and success to go around for everyone. Across our programs, MCJC disrupts conventional needs-based narratives and bears witness to the abiding resilience long-cultivated in Northside. We build on deep networks of care, long histories of courageous leadership, and rich traditions of creative community to revive the vibrant, diverse, affordable, and family-friendly neighborhoods our neighbors prize. We share with our neighbors a vision of a beloved community and a commitment to preserving the future of Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top.

About the Position

This role is primarily responsible for holding the essential technical expertise around planning, housing development, financial analysis, data management, and research that enables the NNI to be successful. This is needed so that we can:

• Conduct research into new models of housing development, financing, and policies that can be utilized by the NNI.
• Strategically analyze the development and financial feasibility and risk for potential landbank acquisitions in an increasingly expensive housing market
• Increase capacity to manage the development of landbank homes from acquisition to disposition
• Engage and collaborate with partners to achieve community goals
• Enhance data tracking systems so that community leadership has more information at their disposal to guide and develop strategies
• Effectively evaluate the NNI’s success over the next ten years.

Responsibilities

• Facilitate weekly NNI Team meetings and manage weekly tasks and action items
• Mapping and networking at-risk properties to identify potential acquisition opportunities.
• Proactively evaluate potential property acquisitions, including studying potential renovation/new construction options, zoning and entitlement requirements, site and utility constraints, financial feasibility, strategic importance of property, disposition options, and history of home.
• Prepare project concepts and decision-making frameworks for review and decision by the Compass Group.
• Support acquisition process as needed, including due diligence items like comparative market assessments or appraisals, surveys, etc.
• Lead the predevelopment of landbank properties, including conversations with the relevant Planning Department, OWASA, and development partners; applying for zoning entitlements or other permits, and coordinating with external design partners and the NNI Construction Manager.
• Development and refinement of scopes of work for land bank properties by collaborating with the construction manager. This will be an iterative process with feedback from the development partner, design partner, funding sources and financial feasibility, etc.
• Monitor development budgets and project timelines
• Manage property disposition processes through working closely with General Contractors, coordination with affordable housing development partner staff, town staff, affordable housing partners, and other external partners.
• Guide families who are buying market rate homes through the landbank through the pre-closing process.
• Provide guidance or ability to quickly research and produce information to lead community advocacy around land-use and policy issues, and respond to Emerging Processes that directly affect community residents (ex. LUMO, NCD revisions, affordable housing bond advocacy, tax valuations, variance applications)
• Lead data analysis and tracking within home repair program
• Manage work scopes and coordination of repair subcontractors, with possibility of taking on management of the home repair program
• Enhance and maintain data collection systems in order to better inform NNI strategies with the aim of increasing the Black population in Northside and successfully report on NNI successes to UNC, Town, and grantmaking partners.
• Support in grant writing and fundraising efforts by tracking and reporting on housing justice goals as well as reviewing grant and drafting language in collaboration with fundraising staff person
• Serve as primary point of contact for all landbank properties as it relates to scheduling maintenance either in occupied properties between tenants and the property manager or in un-occupied properties as needed
• Support communicating the history, model, and success of the NNI to new communities, potential partners, and donors.
• Research and develop new housing models aligned with Compass Group aspirations that can be used by the landbank. These models include- rent to own process for landbank homes and reparations models.

Ideal qualities:

Listening-centered: You model patience. You listen to a wide variety of voices,

including your own. You believe in the power of listening as the primary mode of

community work.

Confident researcher: You are a fast learner who loves to dive deeply into a new

topic, thoroughly interrogate it, and structure your research to produce compelling

data and arguments. You are willing to fully learn about a situation in order to take

decisive action based on the information you gather. You can make

recommendations knowing your understanding of an issue is rock-solid.

Creative and Persistent: If one solution doesn’t work, you are able to step back and

create another solution to overcome an obstacle. You can approach an issue from

multiple directions in order to find a path forward. You think flexibly and are able to

adapt in order to find win/wins. In doing research, you can continue to patiently

follow a thread until you get the information you need.

Interest in policy, real estate, and land-use: You see the connections between

policy, real estate, financing, land-use and how they impact historically African

American communities. You are excited to learn and apply it in order to benefit the

neighborhoods

A knack for details and organization: you enjoy understanding the minutiae. You

can find ways to organize data that works best for your team. You are meticulous in

the details.

Project manager: You can take a large project, break it into smaller components,

and guide it from start to finish, delegating tasks, managing timelines and budgets,

in order to lead the project team to success.

Skilled Translator: You can translate housing technical concepts into the core of

what residents care about or are willing to learn the language of the Housing Team.

Accountable: You model leadership and are willing to take responsibility, good or

bad. You work well both independently and with a team, and pursue work that you

are proud of. You embrace hard conversations as pathways for individual and

collective learning.

Experience and Qualifications

The candidate should have experience in and/or a strong drive to learn more in the

following competencies with an ability to learn quickly:

• Basic understanding of zoning and planning processes, and how to evaluate the development potential of a residential property
• Ability to prepare and evaluate back of the envelope financial pro formas
• Ability to research real estate deeds and review legal documents (deeds, deed restrictions, surveys, contracts, leases, etc).
• Ability to take a proactive, detail-oriented, and creative problem-solving approach to complex projects.
• Strong organizational and project management skills, with the ability to juggle multiple projects and work independently to meet goals and deadlines
• Eagerness and comfort working in community settings with diverse groups
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to communicate technical information to community leaders and lay people in an approachable and understandable fashion

Shared staff responsibilities:

Regular staff meetings and “staff gathers”

Weekly cleaning rotation

Ready participation in full team events and initiatives (Good Neighbor Initiative, Northside Festival, Holiday Party, NNI events and celebrations, porch parties, and Public History events such as Community Cinema Nights and Gateway Community Design Meetings)

All obligations and functions defined by the MCJC Handbook of Policies and Protocols