Capital can do more than acquire an asset. It can decide what happens to it next.

Housing and education

Location influences access. We do not claim more than that.

Where a family lives determines which public-school attendance zone their children fall in, how far a parent commutes, and which resources are a walk away. Research on housing stability and school stability points the same direction: children who change schools mid-year tend to fall behind, and families change schools most often when they lose their housing.

Housing does not sit on its own. The people who have worked longest on this in Atlanta tend to name the same three basics together, food, housing and education, because a family missing any one of them is unstable in all three. The fund works the housing piece, and selects for neighborhoods where the other two are within reach: a school worth staying for, and somewhere to buy groceries without a car.

We do not believe a school rating defines a neighborhood, and we do not claim that our ownership improves any child's academic results. We do believe that access to educational options matters to families, that it shapes where they choose to stay, and that a landlord who keeps a home well and keeps a family in it is one of the quieter contributors to school continuity. The thesis is about access, not prestige.

Where the thesis came from

Four ZIP codes in six years.

The General Partner grew up in Section 8 housing, on government assistance, and changed ZIP codes four times in six years. Those moves did not only decide where he slept. They decided which classroom he sat in, which teachers knew his name, and how often he started over.

Years later he helped found a public charter school in Atlanta. The first year nearly did not open for want of enrollment. The second year it filled. And then he watched children leave in the middle of the school year, not because they or their families wanted to go, but because the housing underneath them moved. Each one was a line on an enrollment report and a rupture in a child's education.

He is not an unusual case. In the 2023–24 school year, public schools identified more than 1.5 million students experiencing homelessness, the highest figure since national reporting began in 2004 and a 12.6 percent increase in a single year. Of those students, 47.7 percent were chronically absent, and 70.1 percent graduated high school.

That is the whole origin of this fund. The buildings a person finances are not only assets. They are the backdrops to somebody's childhood, and the decision about who owns them, and how, is made by investors.

A family should be able to count on two things: a home to return to and a school to stay in.

Student homelessness figures: National Center for Homeless Education, federal data summary for the 2023–24 school year, the most recent national reporting available. External research, cited as such; it describes national conditions, not the fund's results.