Colleagues at the New York City Housing Development Corp. and elsewhere remembered Rich Froehlich as an affordable housing champion.
“He connected people and ideas. There was never a problem too complicated for him to untangle and to guide us all through,” HDC President Eric Enderlin said after Froehlich, the agency’s chief operating officer and first executive vice president, died in New York from a sudden heart attack on Friday. He was 57.
“This is an incredible loss for us all and for the whole of our city,” Enderlin added. “There was never a problem too complicated for him to untangle and to guide us all through. His presence will be missed dearly by the entire affordable housing industry and especially at HDC, where he served and led the city through some of our biggest challenges for nearly two decades.”
HDC finances the creation and preservation of affordable housing for low-, moderate- and middle-income New Yorkers.
Froehlich’s expertise, which drew national recognition, included the use of tax-exempt private activity bonds to finance affordable housing.
Froehlich was president of the National Association of Local Housing Finance Agencies at the time of his death. He served on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board for a four-year term that ended in 2018.
He played a critical role in the creation of “recycled bonds,” which provided the city and its communities with billions of dollars of new tax-exempt bonds; the New Issue Bond Program, which provided affordable financing to housing finance agencies throughout the country amid the Great Recession; and the deployment of the Federal Finance Bank to provide low interest rate debt for affordable housing developments.
Froehlich also ran point on the design and implementation of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2014 housing initiative: “Housing New York: A Five-Borough, Ten-Year Plan,” designed to create and preserve 200,000 affordable homes.
“Rich pushed at every turn to secure more of the resources we need to do this critically important work,” Enderlin said.
Froehlich was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. There, he taught courses on affordable housing finance and public finance.
“This is truly a great loss to many,” said Jonathan Paine, NALHFA’s executive director.
Before joining HDC, Froehlich was a counsel at law firm O’Melveny & Meyers LLP where he was involved in numerous multi-family housing transactions representing equity investors, lenders, credit enhancers and issuers in bond-financed transactions. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia is 1985 and 1988, respectively.
The advocacy organization New York Housing Conference honored him in 2015 for his public service.
A graveside service is scheduled for 2:15 p.m. Thursday at Wellwood Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York. Shiva services are set for noon to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Clement Clarke Moore Park, 22nd Street and 10th Avenue, Manhattan.