Last we spoke with Matthew Wiltshire, he had returned to his beloved Nashville with an eye toward serving the people there. He was doing that in economic development and housing and then a bigger opportunity appeared. He took a shot and learned through the process that there are many ways to serve. Find out how sticking with what seems most pressing can provide some of the best payoffs.
Last we spoke with Matthew Wiltshire, he had returned to his beloved Nashville with an eye toward serving the people there. He was doing that in economic development and housing and then a bigger opportunity appeared. He took a shot at running for Mayor of the City of Nashville and learned through the process that there are many ways to serve. He also found that the health of a city and a family has a lot to do with home.//In this episode, find out from Matt how sticking with what seems most pressing can provide some of the best payoffs…on Roads Taken Revisited with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Matthew Wiltshire is a native of Nashville, Tennesse. After a valiant run in the Nashville mayoral race in 2023, he is currently the President of the Pathway Housing Fund, which utilizes low-cost capital to acquire naturally-occurring affordable housing properties in Tennessee that are at risk of becoming unaffordable and provides quality housing for residents. Prior to joining Pathway, Matt worked at MDHA, Nashville's public housing authority, and served as the Director of Economic and Community Development for the city. And somehow along the way, in addition to the properties, he has acquired six kids who keep him busy, and worried, and deeply in love.
For Matt’s first appearance on Roads Taken, listen to The Home Stretch.
Matthew Wiltshire: After the mayor's race, the public sector, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, and the philanthropic sector aligned...that if we are all working together, not everyone's always gonna agree on what the right solution is—whether it's to homelessness or education or the environment. But if everybody is rowing together, we're gonna make a lot of progress.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Last we spoke with Matthew Wiltshire, he had returned to his beloved Nashville with an eye towards serving the people there. He was doing that in economic development and housing. And then a bigger opportunity appeared. He took a shot and learned through the process that there are many ways to serve. Find out how sticking with what seems pressing can provide some of the best payoffs on today's Roads Taken Revisited with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here for a Roads Taken Revisited, bringing back a guest that we had, I cannot believe it, five years ago.
MW: Holy smokes
LJR:..on this program. I know. And that guest is Matt Wiltshire, who last we spoke to was trying to figure out the best way to serve his beloved Nashville. And we're just gonna catch up and see what he's been doing for the, those five years, both domestically and professionally, so that’s…So good to see you again.
LJR: It's great to see you, Leslie, and it's wonderful to reconnect here and hear updates and share updates. And let me just thank you again for this. I am a long time listener, second time guest. But have really appreciated the opportunity to catch up with some folks who I talk to frequently and hear updates on folks who I haven't seen in 30 years.
LJR: That's right. So last we spoke, you had already been serving the people of Nashville, the communities of Nashville, through your work in city government.
MW: Yeah.
LJR: And, but we're also getting into not only economic development things, but what that meant for the people of Nashville, particularly housing. I am gonna let you kind of tell the story.
MW: Catch you up to today. Well, I'll start with graduation. The abbreviated version just because each of those steps along the way have sort of built to where we are now. So as folks may remember, I spent the first 15 years of my career in investment banking and venture capital, doing a lot with the private sector obviously, and spreadsheets. Learned a lot in that experience and loved it. Capital structures, how to build something sustainable. Then spent eight years as the Director of Economic and community Development in Nashville, helping the city grow. This is in the aftermath of the Great Recession. So when I started, the unemployment rate was over 8% in Nashville, and eight years later after serving under three different mayors, which was an interesting experience in itself, working with three different mayors. The unemployment rate was 2%, and the challenges that the city was facing had shifted from not enough jobs to too many jobs and rapidly appreciating housing costs.
And so at the end of the time in city government, I helped the then Mayor David Briley launch a $750 million, 10-year affordable housing plan. So this was in 2019 and I moved to the Public Housing Authority, MDHA, to implement a piece of that plan and, and housing affordability had been an issue for some time, was really becoming an issue and obviously since then has only accelerated in its impact on families in Nashville, certainly, but across the country. And so served there for three years, then made the run for mayor.
LJR: Didn't go exactly as you'd planned probably, but…
MW: Came in third out of a field of 11 or 12 candidates, came in third. And in Nashville the mayor's race is nonpartisan and top two make the runoff and came in third about 3000 votes. Short of making the runoff.
LJR: Walk us through kind of what that felt like and then where, what paths that lead led you to.
MW: Sure. Well those of your listeners who I did know in college or even before would not have been surprised to hear that I ran for mayor. It's something that I've long time been interested in and I feel really grateful that I did that. It was a wonderful experience. Got to learn a lot about Nashville, meet a bunch of folks, and. Really enjoyed the process of running for mayor. I shouldn't say this too much because folks who supported my campaign may be listening, but I am, there are many days that I'm grateful I did not win. We just came through an ice storm here, and, and that is a taxing experience for anyone and the commitment that you need to make to that job…many jobs, but that job in particular is really a 24-7 experience. And as we've talked about previously, I have three kids and three step kids. And, and so there's a lot of things to juggle at any time of the day, but certainly if your job involves a 24-7 service of the city. And so, super grateful to have run grateful to have had that experience. Grateful for the time that I've had with my family over the last two and a half years and public service is still in my blood part of what I do and, and part of what I'm doing professionally now. And we can talk a little bit about that as well. But it was a, it was a great experience and thank you to anyone listening who supported the campaign and, you know, we'll see what, what the next chapter holds.
LJR: Yeah. Talk me through housing.
MW: After the mayor's race, the public sector, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, and the philanthropic sector aligned that if we are all working together, not everyone's always gonna agree on what the right solution is, whether it's to homelessness or education or the environment. But if everybody is rowing together, we're gonna make a lot of progress. So tying it back to college, the rowing analogy and my great lessons under Scott Armstrong. And so after the campaign, I jumped in with both feet and there is a great initiative actually I think a Princeton graduate, Mark Etheridge, who is from Charlotte, North Carolina and had moved back to Charlotte and was doing development and Mark saw a lot of apartment buildings in Charlotte being bought and painted and landscaped, and the rents jacked up 40% and the residents being displaced, and he thought there was a different way to approach that. And so this is now a commercial for Mark Eridge and Ascend Housing, which is a great story. Look it up if you're interested in housing. So after the campaign, I started talking to Mark and was gonna implement his approach to holding prices affordable for rent in Nashville. But came to find out that really the secret sauce for what Mark does is investment with below cost capital from the city. And that was not allowed under state law in Tennessee. So I put the conversations with Mark on hold—this is now in the spring of ’24—and went to the state legislature, got legislation changed. To enable what Mark does to to be allowed in Tennessee, which was a, I'm now gonna pat myself on the back. I had a Democratic sponsor in the house and a Democratic sponsor in the Senate and in the state of Tennessee, that's also known as a death knell for your legislation. But because housing affordability really is now a bipartisan issue and impacting areas across the state, we were able to get that bill passed. And I during that process, started talking with a nonprofit. CDFI, which stands for Community Development Financial Institution. Essentially a nonprofit bank called Pathway Lending and ended up joining Pathway because they could access low cost equity in addition to the now low cost debt that we could get. And so really. For the finance nerds out there, it's just a weighted average cost of capital, low…hacking capitalism to solve affordable housing. And so we have now raised $30 million of low cost equity. We will lever that up two to one. And we, in the midst of the ice storm closed our first acquisition of 101 apartments in Donaldson, which is a part of Nashville that's now known as Hip Donaldson. And we will preserve those units as affordable in perpetuity. And so from the spreadsheets of investment banking to the city service and interacting with city government to the time at the public housing authority, working specifically on affordable housing sort of brought us to where we are today.
LJR: This is so helpful, Matt, because in college I felt as though I knew you very well, and then the investment banking piece just seemed to be a little, oh, we're taking this turn and it really, really makes sense now because all the things that you've been passionate about since the moment I met you are only elevated and, quite frankly, allowed by your understanding of how the markets work and all the financing and all of that, and it just seems like that puzzle has finally come together for you in a way that it was always destined to. But it feels like you have all the background and skills and that plus the passion makes it all work, so, yay.
MW: That's very kind of you. Thank you. You weren't the only one. I can't remember if I've told this story to you or not, but my mom was a professor at Vanderbilt, so she subscribed to the Chronicle of Higher Education and she sent me a cartoon that had run shortly after I accepted my offer to go to Montgomery Securities. And there were two clowns. An older man, older woman and they had this sad clown face paint on, and standing in front of them was a little boy, maybe 10 years old in a suit holding a briefcase. And the caption was, “Mom, Dad, I have decided to run away and join a law firm.” And they scratched out law firm and wrote Investment Bank on it. And I think my parents were actually sad when I went into investment banking. They didn't tell their friends, you know, parents like, oh, what's your child doing? Well, Matt's, you know, looking for work. He's got a job. But they did not want to admit to their friends.
LJR: They would have been much happier with the circus.
MW: Yeah, that's right. That's right. But it has come full circle and it does feel like the sort of building blocks along the way have come to this to build this building, which is fun.
LJR: Yeah. Excellent. Okay, so now you have a building. Are you gonna have lots of buildings? Is that the plan?
MW: If…God willing we'll see. So we'll have spent about $3 million of our equity capital and levered that up. So the plan is with the capital that we've raised thus far to go acquire six to eight total apartment communities in Nashville, but we have a footprint across the state. It's our hope. We have interest in…any of those investors who are listening know that a lot of investors wanna see proof of concept. And we're very grateful for the banks that have invested in us thus far based just on an idea. But we do hope that we'll be able to raise additional capital. And I think this idea of essentially acquiring apartment buildings, but instead of trying to push rents, invest in them, but hold the rents affordable makes good business sense and is a sustainable investment thesis. And so yes, we think this could translate fairly broadly.
LJR: Scalable elsewhere and certainly just to the point in Nashville where you can hopefully look back and say, okay, we've accomplished something that's really important, that hit the needs and did what it needed to do. Now, as you said, change…challenges evolve in a city, so I can definitely think that once you've gotten successes here, you're gonna see that next big challenge and probably go after it. So it's kind of exciting to not know what that'll be, but. It'll be something. Right?
MW: It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. And, and I, I mean, honestly, I feel selfish every day. The rewards that we get are pretty spectacular. There was an email that we got; we had a meeting with residents the Wednesday after we closed, and there was a lot of anxiety and a lot of nervousness. And I got an email from one of the folks who came to that who said, you know, you can't imagine the concern. I've lived in apartment buildings that have been acquired and torn down. I've lived in places where the rent gets jacked up 40%, and after talking to you and hearing what that you cared about what we want for the apartment buildings, I'm so excited for this next chapter. And so it just, I mean, it's super fun. It's really, really fun.
LJR: So you're home for a while.
MW: Home for a while, I think. And, and hopefully we can help maintain and facilitate a home for lots of other folks. And this feels like the, the, the challenge for the next road, the next road to be taken.
LJR: Excellent. So Matt, you talk with great care about other people's families and doing the best that you can for families in Nashville. I know that your family has, has grown in lots of different ways and. It also isn't always the easiest, so. Are you willing to share a little bit about what's going on with you?
MW: I would be happy to. I am nothing if not transparent. Everybody's story is their own story to, to tell, and that's true for the person I referenced but didn't name earlier who's a resident at East Lake. But, but true for us as well. And I guess, as I mentioned, I have three kids and three step kids, and they are 22, 21, 20, 18, 16 and eight.
LJR: Oh God.
MW: His, hers and ours. So I have a 22-year-old and a second grader.
LJR: Oh my gosh. I do not have the energy for the second grader.
MW: Yeah. Yeah. And, and she has a lot of it. But, but one of the, one of the sort of revealing things for me about that experience is that you, you have these kids, you have similar backgrounds, similar stories. In some cases, the same parents. But every kid is different. And the diversity of life, even in this sort of one little family, that that diversity has really opened up my eyes and I think helped me understand and be less judgmental of the world that we all are walking through and everybody has their own story and you've profiled a ton of them on this podcast. And man, how boring would it be if every story were the same? I for sure do not understand some of the choices that some of the kids have made at different times. And once I get over my own frustrations, which is me dealing with me, it is really opening up and, and being curious and hearing their stories is important.
And I mean, I will, without naming names, say that we've struggled with a variety of challenges, mental health, addiction most acutely, and that is hard. I have felt guilt as a parent, what did I do or not do to produce this? And I for sure have made a hundred mistakes, and that's not always easy to admit. And certainly when you're in the midst of the crisis, it feels particularly overwhelming. At least it did for me.
And so if there's anything I would share with anyone listening now who may be struggling with a particularly challenging parenting situation, it is that you are not alone. We are all dealing with something that something may be something different. And for anyone out there in particular who's facing challenges with addiction I would encourage you to please reach out to me because when you're in that moment. There's a ton of pressure and time and sensitivity, and it feels like it's crisis and it's imperfect information. You don't know what you're doing. At least I for sure didn't, and it's really, really hard. So if there's anything that I can do to answer questions or just be someone to listen to, someone out there who's going through that, I wanna offer that up as well.
And it has been a really beautiful journey for us and for our family, and I think we've all grown through that experience. Don't know how the story's gonna end, but mostly just trying to stay focused and positive. And I've gone to a bunch of Al-Anon meetings and any of your listeners who've been to Al-Anon, I hope would sing the praises of it as well. And I think even if you don't have a family member struggling with addiction, the ideas and the concepts behind that of only controlling what you can control and being responsible and accountable for yourself. It's a really great lesson and a really helpful one as we're all trying to wander down these roads. So so yeah, that's the, that's the personal side of the story. That's not always the glamorous on Instagram version, but is the real and rich and rewarding part of it.
LJR: Yeah. I remember, Matt, you actually reached out to me after we aired an episode with Luke Brown who was talking about how his graduate studies didn't pan out the way he had had hoped. And I remember he walked away thinking that it was kind of a bummer of an episode. And you called me and you said, thank you so much for that episode and thank you know, can I get in touch with Luke because it is real. You know, that's the real life stuff. It's not the Instagram version. It's…this is a messy life that we live in, and if we can't hear the stories of one another, we're gonna feel like we're alone, but we're not alone. Like it's, the mess is different, but the messiness of it is not different. So thank you for sharing that and I'm [MW: Sure] being a resource.
Speaking of resources, you had told me a little bit earlier that a college buddy of yours did a little solid for you and a bunch of boys, reminding them to get some tests done. So tell me a little bit about that.
MW: Yeah, absolutely. This is a great lesson that I learned and luckily it was an easy lesson to learn…easier than some of my classes in Dartmouth. The 8:00 AM. Freshman winter calculus class that I attended irregularly. It was a tougher lesson to learn. But I wanna give a shout out to the legendary Caleb Moore, who I'll recommend as a guest for you and a future episode. Yeah. I mean, public pressure now.
LJR: Oh, he’d better come on. Mm-hmm. There we go.
MW: But Caleb had sent a text to a few of us who we were all turning 50 and said, Hey, go get a bunch of tests. And I went as a diligent student and got all those tests done and most of 'em were fine. A1C and
LJR: Medical tests, yeah.
MW: and ophthalmology, dermatology. A whole list of tests. I mean, it was a, it was a page and a half long text of get these tests. And the last one was a high speed CT scan of my heart. And I work out five or six days a week and have not had any health issues. And so I thought this was sort of a check the box, but it came back and said that I had a 70 to 90% blockage in my heart. Which you, you know, is not what you want to have.
LJR: No.
MW: So I went then and had an angiogram. Which revealed that the blocker was actually more like 50 to 60%, not 70 to 90. They do a stent at 70 and bypass at 90. So I didn't have a stent yet, but I did become essentially vegan-ish, pescatarian vegan. So, you know, eat fish, no dairy. And you know, now on the long list, as many of your listeners may be of statins and blood pressure and a bunch of other stuff
LJR: I'm a new person. Yep, yep.
MW: Yep. You know, look there, this is just, this is the next chapter. And I think the, the relevant lesson, I cannot encourage enough folks to go get the tests preventive, knowing what you're facing is you just have a much better chance of being successful. And we all know that, but it's, you know, not the number one thing on the to-do list. We've gotta pick up kids or works demanding. I would humbly suggest that, for anyone listening, pause the podcast and go make an appointment to get all the tests because worst case scenario, you wasted some money, which is, which is serious. I don't want to diminish that, but that's also the best case scenario. You find out, hey, I'm actually healthy, and you passed a test. LJR: Right. We love getting good grades.
MW: Yeah. Love getting good grades. Yeah.
LJR: Great. Excellent. So PSA for every.
MW: There we go.
LJR: And we're glad that you got the care you needed.
MW: Yeah.
LJR: So that you can pescatarian or not live a long, full life. So…well, thanks for that.
MW: Absolutely.
LJR: And we're sure that everything else in your life is really full. And just knowing how well you serve your community and your family, I just have to thank that that's gonna come back to you and I, I wish that for you and thanks so much for sharing it with us.
MW: It was certainly great to catch up with you as well.
LJR: That was Matt Wiltshire, who after a valiant run in the Nashville mayoral race in 2023 is currently the president of the Pathway Housing Fund, which utilizes low cost capital to acquire naturally occurring affordable housing properties in Tennessee that are at risk of becoming unaffordable and provides quality housing for residents.Prior to joining Pathway, Matt worked at MDHA, Nashville's Public Housing Authority and served as the Director of Economic and Community Development for the city. And somehow along the way, in addition to the properties, he's acquired, six kids who keep him busy and worried and deeply in love.
We've loved bringing you this little mini season of our show this spring when it wraps, just know that you'll be able to re-listen to these episodes and the nearly 200 others we've produced over the years in our archive at RoadsTakenShow.com. There you can find great before-after photos of our guest, show notes, transcripts, and hundreds of hours of audio candy for your listening pleasure. We could not be more thankful for your listening and sharing our show with others who love to hear about the ups, downs, and twists and turns as described by my guests to me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.