Tending Our Garden: Why Candide Group Invests in Home and Place
The Imperative
The housing affordability crisis is not short of diagnosis. Every report, every conference, every meme confirms what anyone paying rent already knows: the gap between what families can afford and what housing costs is widening and not in a way that may self-correct.
Despite decades of committed work by developers, nonprofits, and housing authorities creating millions of affordable units, the crisis is accelerating, not slowing. Housing affordability isn't an abstract policy problem. It's the foundation that determines whether families can build stability, whether children can succeed in school, whether communities can remain intact across generations and right now, that foundation is giving way for too many people.
Traditional solutions aren't keeping pace. Government funding is retreating. Market-rate development serves the top of the income distribution. Impact capital exists but is fragmented, leaving brilliant innovations in silos, unable to scale.
Enter Candide
Candide is the titular character in Voltaire's 18th-century satirical novel. Throughout the story (Spoilers!), Candide suffers catastrophe after catastrophe while his mentor insists they live in "the best of all possible worlds" and that everything happens for a reason, that it all works out in the end. It's absurd philosophy in the face of real suffering.
By the end, Candide rejects both the naive optimism and the paralysis of despair. His famous conclusion? "Il faut cultiver notre jardin” or “we must cultivate our garden” (for the non-francophones). Not grand theories or cosmic explanations. Practical work on what's in front of us.
The housing parallel is obvious, though inverted. Voltaire mocked naive optimism ("everything happens for a reason!"). Today's housing discourse is trapped in the opposite extreme: pervasive cynicism and fatalism. The market is broken. Government won't act. NIMBYs will block everything. Private equity will extract all the value. Nothing fundamental will change.
Both extremes are paralyzing. Blind optimism makes you passive (trust the market, it'll self-correct). Cynical despair makes you inactive (the system is rigged, why try?)
Meanwhile, families are making impossible trade-offs between rent and everything else.
Candide's answer works for both: Understand the structural inequities and the power dynamics that created them (why things are the way they are) and then do the practical work in front of you to change them.
We should debate optimal capital structures. We should catalog all the structural barriers. We should push for policy consensus. And we should tend the garden in front of us: finance developers building affordable housing, fund models creating sustainable homeownership, connect innovators to capital, back community organizations revitalizing neighborhoods. The structural analysis and the practical work aren’t in tension but rather the former makes the latter more honest and effective.
You may not be able to solve systemic inequality in one swoop. But you don't need to accept it either.You can do concrete work that genuinely moves the needle: building housing, creating ownership pathways, preserving communities. The housing crisis won't be solved solely by better theories about why it exists. It will be solved by disciplined work on solutions that actually pencil financially and for impact.
Tending Our Own Garden: How and Where We Invest
Candide Group invests catalytically and holistically across three interconnected areas:
1. Building Wealth Through Real Estate Ownership - Expanding access to less expensive and less extractive financing for home and commercial ownership, particularly for communities historically excluded.
How we think about it:
The racial homeownership gap is well-documented. Only 45% of Black families and 48% of Latino families own homes compared to 74% of white families and first-generation homebuyers face a starter-home crunch driven by a decade of underbuilding. With Home equity comprising nearly two-thirds of middle-income household wealth, the racial wealth gap won't change without addressing homeownership. The standard we hold to every model is sustainability, specifically the ability to build wealth without trapping families in extractive arrangements or setups likely to default.
What we're looking for:
Pathways to conventional ownership: lease-to-own and down payment assistance with anti-speculation protections
Alternative homeownership models: shared equity, fractionalized ownership, and mortgage alternatives that redefine what homeownership looks like for families conventional markets don’t serve
Restructuring predatory debt products into sustainable mortgages
Commercial ownership models for small businesses and entrepreneurs in underserved communities
Community ownership structures that build collective wealth while providing individual stability
2. Creating Affordable, Livable Communities- Increasing and preserving the supply of affordable housing and developing mixed-use communities by shifting market-rate developer practices, empowering community-led strategies, and lowering the cost of building.
How we think about it:
Most affordable housing capital flows through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. It's the backbone of the industry with nearly 4 million units financed since 1986, but also its constraint. LIHTC structures mean long timelines, complex capital stacks, restricted income targeting, and time-limited affordability. We're interested in strategies that work within this system AND models that go beyond it: mixed-income developments that use market-rate components to accelerate timelines and reduce subsidy dependency, innovative construction methods that lower costs, partnerships with mission-aligned landowners who contribute land, and innovative building approaches that improve both resident affordability and operating economics.
What we're looking for:
Development strategies serving 30-80% AMI with sustainable operating models
Mixed-income communities that balance financial viability with meaningful affordability
Partnerships with faith-based institutions, CDCs, and community organizations that contribute land or assets
Innovative construction approaches (modular, cross-laminated timber, adaptive reuse) that reduce costs
Preservation models that maintain existing affordable stock while improving quality
3. Reclaiming and Revitalizing Communities - Preserving culture and strengthening healthy community networks to build vibrant, resilient places that resist displacement.
How we think about it:
Investment in gentrifying neighborhoods often accelerates displacement rather than benefiting existing residents. We look for approaches that ensure capital actually strengthens communities rather than extracting from them: community land trusts that lock in permanent affordability, commercial corridor revitalization that benefits existing businesses, cultural preservation through real estate ownership and control, and anti-displacement mechanisms that protect long-term residents while enabling neighborhood improvement.
What we're looking for:
Community land trusts and permanent affordability mechanisms
Commercial real estate strategies that support locally-owned businesses
Anti-displacement tools in gentrifying neighborhoods
Models that give communities ownership and control over their built environment
Why this structure matters:
Solving structural problems in affordability requires a broad toolkit. The problems are interconnected. A family needs a path from rental to ownership. A community needs housing preservation, new supply, and neighborhood revitalization that makes stability worth having. Solutions in one market inform strategies in another, which is why we invest across all three rather than picking a lane.
We need to tell a better story about affordable housing: the connectivity between stable housing and financial stability, upward mobility, health and education outcomes, generational wealth creation. Housing isn't just real estate. It's the foundation for everything else. But the constraint isn't storytelling. It's the financial infrastructure.
The infrastructure around affordable housing finance is fragmented by design. VCs, LIHTC funds, CDFIs, and community nonprofits all work in the same problem space and rarely in the same room. We invest across that spectrum not because we think breadth is virtuous, but because the interconnections between these domains are where the real leverage lives.
Join Us in the Garden
The housing crisis won't be solved by better theories. It will be solved by better work.
You don't need to solve the entire housing crisis to make a difference. But you can't accept it as inevitable either. Start where you are. Do the concrete work. Build what you can.
If you're building: Developers, entrepreneurs, community organizations with housing solutions that pencil financially and for impact - we want to partner with you.
If you're deploying capital: Fund managers, family offices, foundations figuring out how to invest in housing with rigor - let's compare notes.
The opportunities are real. The need is urgent. The constraint is infrastructure.
Let's tend the garden together.
Candide Group is an SEC-registered impact investment firm headquartered in Oakland, California, dedicated to redirecting capital away from extractive economic systems toward enterprises that advance social justice and sustainability. Registration does not imply any certain level of skill or training. Founded by Aner Ben-Ami and Morgan Simon, the firm has directed more than $500 million into over 169 companies and funds on behalf of families, foundations, athletes, and cultural influencers who believe their money should reflect their values.
Candide Group's name is drawn from Voltaire's classic novel — a reminder that confronting injustice demands not despair, but concrete, immediate action.
