Complexity of Housing: Catalyst Housing Group's Innovation Lead Annie Koo on New Approaches, Peer Women, and Keeping Momentum
By Julia Gamolina
Annie Koo is the Innovation Lead at Catalyst Housing Group, where she is focused on scaling Catalyst’s essential housing platform across the full spectrum of housing affordability, from homelessness to homeownership.
Prior to Catalyst, Annie was the Director of Housing at Sidewalk Labs, the former urban innovation arm of Alphabet, where she oversaw residential program and product development. While at McKinsey from 2014 to 2018, she served public finance and housing institutions on strategy and operational transformations. She started her career at the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the nation’s largest affordable housing agency. She is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia Business School and was a Fulbright Fellow in Singapore focused on public housing. In her interview, Annie talks about building a varied foundation of experiences and innovating with context, advising those just starting their career to sit at the table.
Tell me about your foundational years - where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
I grew up in McAllen, Texas. My parents are clinicians who served primarily low-income communities on both sides of the border. I didn’t really know what architecture and design meant, but I have always been vexed by spaces, turning them over in my head, trying to improve them. The Rio Grande Valley is complex, especially now, but I feel lucky to have been raised there. It, and especially my parents, gave me a worldview that has been foundational to my work.
What did you learn about yourself in studying architecture?
That constraints really are the best inspiration. And that I was not cut out to be an architect. My architecture “career” started and ended with me designing my parents’ home.
Annie with her parents at their home.
How did you get your start in the field?
I had a lot of false starts as I tried to match interest and function. I tried architecture journalism, public interest law, and volunteered for social impact design nonprofits. But ultimately, it was the NYC Urban Fellows program that set me on my path in housing and strategy. I joined HPD in the Bloomberg Administration in the grips of the Great Recession and foreclosure crisis. That sounds like simple times relative to 2021! But it was an incredible crash course on the complexity of housing: the capital sources; the choreography of government, finance, and nonprofits; the policy levers for preservation versus production.
Tell me how your work evolved, and you with it.
After HPD, I wanted to round out my public sector experience. I swung in the opposite direction and got an MBA and joined McKinsey. I loved management consulting: it was fast-paced and structured, like becoming a corporate Swiss army knife. It also gave me a peek behind the curtain of the world’s biggest housing finance institutions.
Ultimately I itched to get closer to housing innovation, and joined Sidewalk Labs during the Toronto project. I led the housing vertical, which covered everything from design innovation to new financial products in service of affordability. I couldn’t believe the questions we got to ask: could robotics make the day-to-day lives of families in cities easier? Would people trade traditional homeownership for shared equity products? And, later, how could real estate foster inclusive growth? I especially loved taking a user-centered, product view to housing. I learned a lot from my technologist colleagues in that sense.
“I couldn’t believe the questions we got to ask: could robotics make the day-to-day lives of families in cities easier? Would people trade traditional homeownership for shared equity products? And, later, how could real estate foster inclusive growth?”
Where are you in your career today? What is on your mind most at the moment?
I am ready to help build something new. I joined Catalyst this past fall as employee number thirteen with a very clear intent to bring forward new business models for affordable housing. I was inspired by what Jordan Moss had already created — a vehicle for California middle-income housing that does not rely on direct subsidy and has deployed over $2.5 billion in capital since its first project in 2019 — and felt like he had all the pieces in place to build something big. Catalyst has a powerhouse real estate investment and asset management team, is formalizing its housing venture and incubations arm, and I am now partnering with Jordan to advance new ideas to bridge to deeper affordability and ownership.
In a more existential sense though, I really value understanding and working within context, connecting the dots, and making change based on that. It feels rarified today, an age of disruption. Catalyst does this in a very real way: it partners closely with cities, helped stand up a governmental entity, leverages the bond markets, etc. But it does so without eroding its big, bold vision and hustle to get new things done.
Annie’s Zoom session.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through a disappointment or a perceived setback?
Becoming a first-time parent at what at the time felt like one of the biggest moments of my career was very hard. I was retoggling my identity on all these different fronts, against the backdrop of a global pandemic, on zero sleep. I certainly have not figured things out, but on the professional front I have learned to become a bit more adaptive and balanced.
What are you most excited about right now?
I am most excited that there is finally this drumbeat around new approaches to housing. There are so many possible areas to play in, from new — or renewed — construction methodologies, to social impact investing with an affordable focus. I think there is an increasing respect and understanding of the cross-disciplinary nature of housing, versus paying your dues in a single field. I like to endlessly debate which solutions are more or less impactful, but I have to remind myself that momentum is good. This is a sector where the major solutions still at work today were created almost a century ago. A century!
“We need to take every chance we can to sit at the decision-making table, or own the model, or speak up early and often...We deserve more chances at bat, because that’s how we will get better.”
Who are you admiring now and why?
Peer women. They have consistently been the most creative and generous thought partners in my career— sending me coffee chat intros, starting salon discussions on the meaning of work, sharing their playbooks for career exploration. I think because they are in the trenches with me, they can meet me where I am, and that has been invaluable.
What is the impact you’d like to have in the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mission is to find ways to create safe, stable housing while allowing renters and homeowners alike to build diversified wealth. I think Americans have this myopic and often nostalgic view of homeownership. It has been hugely successful for many, but we forget or fail to see how it has massively failed large swaths of the country, fallen out of reach for others, and deepened structural inequality.
Lately it feels like a lottery ticket. Call me a millennial who came of age during two “once in a generation” recessions, but we deserve better — and I don’t just mean innovation on the fringes, on the same fundamental model. Income and wealth disparities are at an all-time high, and housing costs are soaring. Status quo isn’t cutting it. I’d like to be a part of finding one or three of those solutions.
Annie with her family at the Rockaways.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
“Sit at the table!” It’s a phrase drilled into me by my friend and former McKinsey colleague Erin Frackleton. She meant it literally, whenever I tried to slink to the back of the room in a C-suite meeting. I try to do this for women in my orbit. We need to take every chance we can to sit at the decision-making table, or own the model, or speak up early and often. Chances are, we will have thought it through more thoughtfully and comprehensively than anyone else. But also, there will be too many other times when we might not have the opportunity. We deserve more chances at bat, because that’s how we will get better.