Gene Slater has served as senior advisor on housing for federal, state,
and local agencies for over forty years. He cofounded and chairs CSG
Advisors, which has been one of the nation’s leading advisors on affordable
housing for decades and has structured more than $70 billion of
financing for first-time home buyers, mixed-income apartments, neighborhood
revitalization, and improved public housing.
Slater helped design and implement major housing strategies for
Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh,
San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, DC, and Wichita,
and assisted a wide range of small towns and suburbs. His work designing
Pittsburgh’s home improvement loan program, which rehabilitated
18,000 of the city’s 72,000 single-family homes, became the Department
of Housing and Urban Development’s national model for housing rehabilitation.
He has advised the state housing finance agencies of California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New
York, Virginia, Washington State, and many others. His projects have
received numerous national awards, and in 2009, in the aftermath of the
financial crisis, he helped design the program by which the U.S. Treasury
financed homes for 110,000 first-time buyers and 40,000 affordable
rental units.
Slater received a BA from Columbia University summa cum laude, a
traveling fellowship to the London School of Economics, a master’s in city
planning from MIT, and a master’s from Stanford University. A mid-career
Loeb Fellowship in Environmental Design from Harvard University,
awarded to ten planners and architects from around the world each year,
enabled him to study capital markets for housing at the Harvard Business
School and create the first joint Harvard-MIT seminars on financing public-
private partnerships. In 2020, he gave the American Institute of Architects’
first national webinar on the history of housing segregation.
Growing up in Brooklyn—in the only assembly district in New York
State to vote for Barry Goldwater—he helped start what became CSG
Advisors in a rural Wisconsin farmhouse by the Mississippi River, and
has also lived and worked in New York, Boston, Chicago, and the San
Francisco Bay Area, where he currently resides.
