Christopher E. Donald was sworn-in as the Executive Director/CEO of the District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency (DCHFA) in March 2021. Mr. Donald served the Agency as the Interim and Acting Executive Director/CEO from January 2020-March 2021. He is responsible for the overall supervision, coordination, and strategic direction of the District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency. Mr. Donald joined the Agency in October 2016 as the Senior Vice President of Multifamily Lending and Neighborhood Investments where he served as part of DCHFA’s senior management team. His primary responsibility was to manage the day-to-day operations of the Multifamily Lending and Neighborhood Investments (formerly Public Finance) department and assist the Executive Director & CEO with the development of multifamily programs, products, policies and strategic planning.
Mr. Donald has over 15 years of experience in real estate finance, community building, development, land entitlement and construction. He’s entitled over 1MM square feet of mixed-income, transit-oriented, amenity-rich housing. Mr. Donald specializes in acquisitions, entitlement, community visioning and deal structuring. He has completed over $1 billion in real estate financing over the course of his career and renovated over 1,000 multifamily units and entitled and underwritten almost 3,500 multifamily units throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Mr. Donald has also acquired and programmed commercial space for small local businesses and retailers.
As the Director of Development at the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH), Mr. Donald underwrote and structured $60MM in Low Income Housing Tax Credit transactions. Over the last several years he has provided underwriting services to the Office of State Superintendent for Education for the District of Columbia and financed over $300 million in improvements for public charter schools using New Markets Tax Credits, tax exempt bonds and other tools. Mr. Donald began his career in finance at Lehman Brothers in the Municipal Finance Group and underwrote $200MM in revenue bonds for the District of Columbia.
Prior to his tenure at DCHFA, Mr. Donald served as the Principal and Co-Founder of The Leidesdorff Group. The Leidesdorff Group (TLG) is a diversified real estate advisory firm focused on the regeneration of urban communities within the Mid-Atlantic region. As a principal of TLG, Mr. Donald focused on distressed and disinvested urban communities. Mr. Donald serves as the secretary on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Local Housing Finance Agencies (NALHFA) and DCHFA. From 2018-2020 he served on the boards of the African American Real Estate Professionals of D.C. and the Housing Association of Nonprofit Developers (HAND) boards. Mr. Donald is a member of the Urban Land Institute. He is a graduate of Stanford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science