California that we had dealt with before because uh we do a lot in the affordable housing development uh space. And so uh a group uh up in Northern California had figured out that if you had a joint powers authority take title to an asset based on um California law, the constitution of the state of California, you can get a property tax exemption. And so they figured out a structure where you could raise taxexempt municipal uh bonds uh to acquire existing market rate housing uh in a structure where the joint powers…
…idea how this group put together this capital. Kind of don't know how it all worked. Uh but um you know, my business partner is really an expert in affordable housing finance. Yeah. And said, you know, you guys, you and John are pretty smart. Maybe you can figure this out. And so um to to use a basketball analogy, we uh you know, went into the lab, my partner specifically, and then COVID hit and so we you know, we had a lot more free time because we're all at home. So really went into the lab reverse engineering…
and it was a really good blend for us because we had done a lot of market rate housing at that point. Um we had done a lot of commercial acquisitions at that point. Um, and we had done a lot of affordable housing and these workforce housing projects, they had a very nice blend of affordable housing and market rate housing because you were buying market rate housing. So, you had to understand how market rate housing works, how market rate sellers work, but then you were also converting it to workforce, not…
Um we got connected to CSCDA who is a joint powers authority in California who was thinking about doing these programs. We had done work with them on affordable housing bond financing in the past. Um they connected us to Goldman Sachs became our bond underwriter and we started underwriting projects. We had a relationship here with the seller uh LAR um and um we you know had a great relationship with the city of Long Beach. City of Long Beach had a mandate uh from a a housing report they' put out a couple years…