7.4 million homes underserved in terms of housing in the country. Whoa. Right? And what that translates to is that 50% of renters in this country pay more than 30% of their income on rent. Jeffrey Jaeger is the co-founder and principal of Standard Communities. And for over 20 years, he has led more than $6 billion in real estate transactions, helping build one of the 50 largest affordable housing portfolios in the US with over 30,000 units across 22 plus states. My boss is here, the seller is here. This broker's…
Is where we first you know, kind of And and also at the time in the affordable housing market, Fannie and Freddie were the largest buyers of tax credits. You know, they're probably buying 60% of the tax credits across the affordable housing space. And that all stopped come 2007. And so, when that happened, the tax credit market also in affordable housing ground to a complete halt. So, we then were kind of retooling and thinking, "How do we take advantage of the situation?" We knew it was a generational opportunity…
…in multi-family. Mhm. And over time, I mean, if you look back from even, you know, kind of World War II on, it's been this slow progression of housing being this quintessential, you know, infrastructure effectively in the country. And, you know, governments, local governments, and state and federal have been getting more and more involved as as that's been progressing over time. Yeah. And so we sort of just this light bulb went off for us of like, "Hey, we need to focus on figuring out how to get involved and…
And the government needed a partner to help deliver on its mission of affordable housing. And we wanted to be that chosen partner for, you know, either the state, city, or federal government in delivering that housing. And so we retooled our mission, you know, and really focused on building a mission-driven for-profit national developer. And from there, you know, kind of it really has been all about scaling, you know, standard and then we've started a number of other businesses kind of along the way as well, but…