Vince Toye leads the community-development banking and agency lending businesses for JPMorgan Chase.
Courtesy of JPMorgan; BI
Vince Toye leads community-development banking and agency lending for JPMorgan Chase. Navigating affordable housing for middle-income renters can be confusing and stressful. Toye and his team use professional expertise to get deals funded and across the finish line. Read more from BI’s Transforming Business series.
Vince Toye leads two affordable-housing businesses for JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank, in its offices hundreds of feet up the Manhattan skyline. Growing up in a small Virginia town as one of seven kids raised by a single mother, he never expected to reach these heights.
For the first few years of his life, his mother rented single-family homes in a segregated town until she was able to purchase a home; they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. Toye was the first person in his family to go to college.
“If you had asked me when I was growing up, ‘Do you think you would be in New York and that you’d be running two lines of business in a major institution?’ I wouldn’t have said that was possible,” Toye told Business Insider.
Now Toye runs JPMorgan’s community-development banking and agency-lending divisions. Financing affordable housing is so important to the firm, Toye said that one of the first calls he got was from CEO Jamie Dimon, who encouraged him to think big in his new role.
Building homes for middle-income workers
Toye runs the bank’s affordable-housing arm, which finances projects funded by government subsidies to help the poorest renters. His division helped broker $12 billion in deals in 2022. He also works on funding to help renters who earn too much for government-subsidized housing but not enough for market-rate rentals.
This group is part of what Toye calls the “missing middle,” and they face the biggest challenges in the current housing market.
Thanks to subsidies, it’s much easier to finance market-rate-rental projects and low-income housing than to build affordable housing for middle-income people such as teachers, nurses, firefighters, retail clerks, and warehouse workers.
In 2022, Toye launched the firm’s “workforce housing solutions” business to help fill this gap in middle-income housing. The concept originated in the 1970s in Aspen, Colorado, after locals like teachers and ski instructors began getting priced out of the housing market, prompting the local government to work with employers to provide subsidized housing.
While the term now generally refers to middle-income rentals, Toye said employers are once again interested in financing building projects that could house their workers.
More middle-income workers — whether they work for a hospital network, a large retailer, or a warehouse operator — are finding it difficult to afford to live close to their workplaces. Long commutes and high rent can negatively affect employee morale and productivity and increase turnover. Toye said companies that help fund middle-income housing may get first dibs on a percentage of units set aside for their employees, or they can negotiate a master lease on some units, which they can then rent to employees.
For developers, this can help fund deals and get building projects across the finish line. In addition to funding from employers, building a workforce-housing unit may also require a bank loan, local tax credits, abatements, land grants, and money from the developer. This is where Toye comes in, using JPMorgan’s wide-ranging network of banking professionals to find funding solutions.
“There’s no road map, and every deal’s different,” Toye said. The complexity of these deals has kept many large banks away from workforce housing in the past. Some of Toye’s deals have required as many as seven separate funding sources. But because of the housing crisis, it’s become a priority for JPMorgan, Toye said.
While the high cost of borrowing could lead municipalities to pull back on issuing bonds that could help finance affordable housing, Toye said the bank’s leadership wants him to continue pushing ahead.
“When I talk to my manager, or his boss that runs commercial banking, or Jamie, they’re not saying, ‘Well, Vince, you need to slow down,'” Toye said. “It’s, ‘Keep your foot on the pedal. We want you to do more. Do it smartly, and make an impact.'”
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