A Q&A with Robin Wiessmann

Robin Wiessmann, who has led the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency since 2020, has decades of experience in public finance – including stints as state treasurer, state secretary of banking and securities – and as a vice president at Goldman Sachs. She spoke with City & State about what it takes to help people become homeowners in the current market.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

What does your agency do?

We focus on making housing accessible to those of moderate or lesser means. We all know that home ownership is the greatest vehicle for establishing family wealth; we want to encourage it. We do it in two ways. The two core business lines are, first, home ownership, which is typically single-family homes, and helping people become homeowners; and, second, the development of multi-family affordable housing. Both the single-family and multi-family efforts are driven through effective public-private partnerships. 

The homeownership program has primarily provided affordable home loans with interest rates lower than the market rate, and we offer an option that provides assistance with down payments and closing costs. Many aspiring homeowners may be able to afford a mortgage that's roughly equivalent to a rental, but they struggle to cover the down payment. 

We have a nearly $8 billion portfolio. Last year we did $1.5 billion in loans, with an average mortgage of around $250,000.

We also service all of that debt ourselves, so not only do we help people become homeowners, we help them stay homeowners. We have a call center, and our servicing center is always available so that people can actually talk to a person about it. And as a result, we have a lower foreclosure rate than the state average. We have a less than 1% foreclosure rate.

For people trying to find affordable housing in Pennsylvania, what is the good news – and what is the bad news? 

The bad news is that housing scarcity is a real issue across the country. We've got a double whammy here. We haven't built enough new units – I say units instead of houses, because it's both individual and multi-family housing – and we need to invest more in preserving the existing housing stock. You'll hear industry experts talk about how the least expensive housing you have is the housing you're already in – that's the argument for preservation. It’s expensive: the cost of sticks and bricks, the cost of insurance, the amount that you need to still put down for a down payment. There are some non-down-payment mortgage products, but the initial investment is often beyond the reach of individuals or even families.

The good news is that housing is no longer a partisan issue. It's universally accepted that we have to do more. Everybody knows it, everybody recognizes it. All politicians, all public figures, need to work to address it.

In a time of funding uncertainty, what are some of your most crucial programs?

A number of our programs are nationally recognized, including HEMAP, the Home Ownership Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program, which serves as a national model. It helps people stay in their homes when they experience an unanticipated interruption in salary income by providing low-cost loans to help them navigate difficult situations.

If I had my druthers, I would have much more direct investment in housing by federal and/or state government.

One other program is PHARE, the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement Program, which is funded by Marcellus Shale fees and the real estate transfer tax. We have $80 million a year that we can deploy without all of the federal restrictions, because it's state revenues. It's the most flexible funding we have. 

It's driven by individual municipal needs, and a lot of it goes to what's referred to as the missing middle, which falls between the single-family homes we work on and the large-scale multi-family rental properties. It's more about townhomes, rehabilitating smaller rental unit properties, providing down payment assistance that a county might want to incentivize or offering counseling and financial education. 

We just did a round of financing in June to provide assistance for: 270 new affordable housing units; 2,050 affordable housing units to be preserved and rehabilitated; 56 new single family homes; 140 housing units to be created or rehabilitated specifically for households in danger of homelessness; 11,400 families and households seeking housing counseling and financial education; and more than 13,900 families in danger of homelessness.