Today, Lisa Rosenfeld oversees the development, ownership and management of more than 10,000 apartments across the state as vice president of HSL Asset Management. She’s also the  2024 board chair of the Arizona Multihousing Association.

But she started her career 30 years ago at the front office where she lived.

“This is a great industry to make a career out of,” Rosenfeld said. “It’s a very accepting industry. There’s no college degree required. It’s something you can start on-site and the promotion possibilities are really limitless.”

For Rosenfeld, the reward for working in multihousing is bringing residents together.

“You get to see people where they live, and it’s satisfying to be able to provide homes,” Rosenfeld said. “We’re building communities.”

We asked Rosenfeld to talk about her plans as chair in 2024:

Q: What is your agenda for AMA in 2024?

“I got involved originally with the AMA as a networking thing and then quickly came to realize how important the AMA is for our industry. What I want to accomplish during my year as chair is to try to get people to understand we are in the business of housing people, not evicting people.

When you belong to the AMA, you’re agreeing to meet certain standards and to conduct business in a certain way. People have that image of rental owners in their head as a slum lord with dripping sinks. But (in reality) we’re committed to quality housing and creating communities.”

Q: How will you accomplish your vision?

“Our main goal is to try to find opportunities to share the good things that we do with the public. (AMA has) a very active charitable arm that the majority of our member companies participate in and a variety of philanthropic activities.

The AMA Foundation has collected nearly 1,000 blankets for those in need, donated hundreds of Christmas stockings filled with gifts and raised over $1.4 million to support nonprofits dedicated to homelessness, education and autism.”

Q: What needs to be done to solve Arizona’s housing affordability crisis?

“It really comes down to supply and demand. We need to have developer-friendly policies that enable people to build multifamily communities.

Unfortunately a lot of times the local governments don’t really understand the whole cycle of creating housing in a competitive environment. When they increase the red tape, such as requiring EV chargers on all new multifamily developments, that adds costs to the project.”

Q: What are the biggest misconceptions about renting, rental property owners and developers?

“We’re in the business of housing people, not evicting people. When you hear anything about a rental owner (in the news), it has to do with evicting people. But that’s just not what we do. We build and maintain housing for the purpose of people living there happily for many years. The last thing we want to do is evict somebody. But unfortunately, we have a mortgage payment too.

When we have an opportunity to speak with someone face-to-face, it’s not hard to explain that we make money if people are happy and satisfied living in our property. It’s finding the opportunity to have those conversations. Housing is a very emotional issue and unfortunately that can make it very difficult to have a commonsense conversation.”