An Executive Summary with Kate White

Kate White became ULI San Francisco’s first Executive Director in 2005. She is a social entrepreneur with two decades of experience in sustainable urban development and public policy.  Prior to joining ULI, Kate served as founding Executive Director of mission-achieving, economically-robust and replicable organizations, including San Francisco’s first car-sharing service and the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition. Kate has been a leader of land use policy reform and funding campaigns as well as an author and lecturer on housing, smart growth, transit-oriented development, and organizational management. She is also a mentor and coach for students at University of California at Berkeley, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and for Urban Land Institute’s Young Leaders Group.

Full Length Interview

My name is Kate White, and I’m Executive Director of ULI San Francisco.

First Job in Real Estate / Land Use Field:

My first job right out of college was working on a $24 million rehab of a 300-unit, 25-storey high-rise on the lake in Chicago. This was a privately built, mixed-income project that got HUD financing in the ’60s, but the agreements came up in the ’90s (there was a whole bunch of these projects across the country), and there was a threat of it going market rate. The tenants actually organized HUD grants to hire me and a whole bunch of consultants and a construction crew to rehab the building. It was in terrible disrepair, so you might call it irresponsible development or property management. And the tenants were successful in making it a permanently limited equity cooperative ownership.

Mentors in Your Career:

One of my best role models and mentors has been my Chair, Rick Dishnica. He has been the Chair for the last three years. He has been a wonderful mentor not only professionally but personally as well. He is an exceptional businessman, very strategic, very successful, a great manager, and he’s given lots of wonderful advice about running the ULI San Francisco district council. But he has also really helped me in my personal life.

Greatest Career Satisfaction:

I’d say what’s brought me the greatest satisfaction in my career is seeing the fruits of my labor and those are several nonprofit organizations that I helped initiate over the last 10 years. One was City CarShare, which today has 20,000 members sharing 350 cars across the Bay Area; and the other is the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, which was my last job. I helped start that coalition with a handful of organizational members. Now there are over 100 groups that are part of it and they have successfully had over 10,000 units of housing approved in San Francisco, which is quite a feat if you know anything about San Francisco land-use politics.

Toughest Challenges Faced in Your Career:

I actually would say one of my toughest times in my career was working at City CarShare as a start-up because there were just two or three of us. We were running the entire operation, the customer service (we were basically on call 24/7), getting the kinks of the technology worked out, doing outreach and marketing; we were doing it all. It was a very challenging time–very trying on my personal life when you get on call 24/7. What’s happened though is that the organization’s grown. Now there are 20 to 25 staff people at City CarShare, so the burden of running this pretty significant operation is now more evenly spread throughout the staff.

Lessons Learned from Past Real Estate Cycles:

This past cycle has definitely been really challenging for ULI, obviously, we are a real estate land-use organization. And along with the whole industry, we’ve had some significant challenges: we’ve lost a lot of members (several hundred members). What’s been interesting is that our sponsors have actually stayed with us this whole time, and, in some cases, have even increased their sponsorship levels, so we’ve been able to float fine. And I think the lesson learned there is that our company members really value ULI in terms of what it can offer, especially in the downtimes, in terms of professional development and relationship building, in terms of really getting ready for the uptake, and there has been a significant amount of investment in ULI, as an organization. Even during this downturn, I think members really appreciate what we’ve done to help people through the downturn.

Favorite Places in the Bay Area / World:

I think I’m lucky to live in one of my favorite neighborhoods in San Francisco, which is the Mission. One of the reasons I love the Mission is because of the restaurants. The options just get better and better, every week it seems. And also all of the independent boutiques and shops–there is a lot of creativity among the store owners and the population to build up a very creative, inspiring Valencia Street and Mission Street corridor. I also live right on the edge of Bernal Heights. I do my exercises up and down the hills there and I love all the little pedestrian stairwells. I managed to figure out a route for my morning walk where I don’t even pass a car, and so I really love Bernal Heights for that.

One of my other favorite places in the world is Amsterdam. I did a semester there for my graduate studies. I studied transportation and housing policy in Amsterdam. I think the Dutch culture is truly inspiring in terms of the bicycle culture that has evolved there and also the housing. They have a grand total of 300 homeless people in the city of Amsterdam, which is the same size as San Francisco. So clearly they have essentially solved the homeless problem. I was very inspired by their policies that are in place for supportive housing and affordable housing across the city and it really works. It’s a city that really works in a lot of ways.

Favorite Ways to Unwind:

One of my favorite ways to unwind is to play music. This might be something people don’t know about me but I play clarinet. I play with my spouse and we play music a lot: jazz music, jazz standards and also Klezmer music.

ULI’s Impact on Your Career:

It’s funny to have me answer this question of how ULI has impacted my career, because of course ULI has been my career for the last six years. But even before that I was a member of ULI as a young leader, and I was always inspired for many years throughout my career–the last 20 years really. I sort of come from the ecological, urbanism, sustainable development, nonprofit, environmental field, and it’s a very idealistic kind of perspective. And what I’ve always appreciated about ULI is that it’s very pragmatic and it’s made up of the people who don’t just have pretty pictures and concepts of how we should grow, but actually build our environment. It’s been quite an honor to be able to serve this organization for the last six years, and to be able to meet and work with the people who actually build, finance, and design almost every project you see. ULI members touch, in some way, every project you see going up in the Bay Area.

The Executive Summary, developed by Rob DeWaters and Miles Garber, aims to foster wider professional and personal connections across the ULI San Francisco membership.