Carrie hamilton

Carrie Hamilton is a finance professional with 25 years’ experience in affordable housing and policy roles in the United States and Australia, focusing on innovative partnership and project debt/equity strategy. She consults to government and affordable housing developers who seek to finance projects through expanded tools and cross-sector collaboration.

Carrie has championed Australian affordable housing innovation for the past fifteen years. She contributed to the establishment of both the NRAS in 2008 and the NHFIC bond aggregator from its inception as a research project in 2012 through to its creation in 2018. She was invited to advise the Australian Commonwealth Treasury in private sector investment into affordable housing on then-Treasurer Morrison’s Affordable Housing Working Group, which continues in her current advisory input to NHFIC in 2020.

Carrie’s policy advice has also included being named to the NSW government’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on Social Housing Policy, which culminated in 2016’s Future Directions Policy, and the NSW expert advisory panel on planning pathways for the state’s Social and Affordable Housing Fund (SAHF). Earlier, she was appointed to the Commonwealth Advisory Committee on Social Housing from 2011-2013 by the Federal Housing Minister.

More recently, Carrie’s work has focused on stimulating a pipeline of affordable rental housing development that these research-driven mechanisms can ultimately finance. She has co-authored papers including 2018’s “Social housing as infrastructure: an investment pathway,” (Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Lawson, Pawson, et al.) which innovated new arguments for government co-investment into the demonstrated affordable development funding gap. Carrie’s consulting work for both non-profit housing developers and government also includes quantitative analysis of affordable housing feasibility and risk/return metrics.

Carrie previously held a role at Macquarie Bank for seven years (2003 – 2010) where she worked in Macquarie's wholesale development funds division, linking institutional investor with residential development opportunities throughout Australia. Through Macquarie’s in-house development company she also worked on one of the largest joint venture public housing renewals in Australia: the Westwood project in Adelaide. In partnership with the South Australian Housing Trust, Macquarie’s subsidiary revitalized five suburbs of distressed housing through neighbourhood reconfiguration, new construction, and rehabilitation of obsolete stock.

This project related to Carrie’s work in San Francisco at CSG Advisors from 1998-2003, structuring public housing estate renewal projects with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. Her clients were city Housing Authorities and non-profit developers in California, Texas, and Washington, for whom she leveraged private investment that financed hundreds of new affordable rental homes. This background in the American LIHTC program led to pro-bono work with the Housing Summit in Australia, advising the Commonwealth on the development of the NRAS in 2008, which ran successfully through 2014.

Carrie holds a Master’s degree in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley (1998) and earned her Bachelor of Arts undergraduate degree from Yale University (1992).

Skills and expertise

Affordable housing finance strategy and design
Public housing estate and community redevelopment
Property development feasibility
Project management
Debt raising and funding applications
Public Private Partnership establishment and facilitation
Bond finance policy