First year team member experience: Jack Popper

April 23, 2025 – Learning about our team members first-year experiences helps us grow and move our mission forward.

Jack Popper started his position as housing developer with the HumanGood development team on January 13, 2025. Read below to learn about Jack’s experience and impressions of HumanGood.

What drew you to HumanGood?

For five years I worked for a state agency that awarded funding to and regulated affordable housing developers. From that experience, I know that it is not uncommon for developers to pursue just about any site that looks viable, given how difficult it is to identify development opportunities in the first place. By contrast, Vidhi Anderson, VP of Development, said during my interview process that she would only pursue sites where our operations team could meaningfully support our residents. When I heard this, I knew she was leading a team that puts resident quality of life at the center of the work.

What about HumanGood’s culture stands out to you?

HumanGood leadership makes it a priority to ensure teams that might otherwise operate in siloes are giving input to and receiving input from other teams. For example, in the affordable housing industry it’s common that developers don’t sufficiently consider the long-term ramifications of their decisions. But the HumanGood development team has regular meetings with operations teams. These meetings allow us to (a) tap into the resources of both sides to tackle immediate problems and (b) learn more about how things are playing out at properties that are now operational. Absent this regular communication, we would be at risk of repeating mistakes.

Second, it stands out to me that HumanGood takes seriously the wellbeing of employees. Too many organizations are burdened by a culture that puts so much pressure on employees that people burn out and quit. This is especially a problem in affordable housing, where projects are multi-year endeavors. HumanGood is intentional about determining whether it makes sense to take on an opportunity, and a major consideration is assessing staff capacity to ensure taking something on does not overburden the team.

How do you see our mission of inspiring the best life in action?

Early on, while shadowing team members who were monitoring construction progress, I witnessed communications that made clear HumanGood wants to do best by our residents in construction and maintenance standards. Our team didn’t only focus on the quality of units they had gone there to inspect, but they instructed the construction company to address additional items they heard about from residents or stumbled across themselves. This attentiveness to how building and maintenance standards impact resident quality of life sets HumanGood apart from many other housing providers.

What do HumanGood’s values mean to you?

I see them as the ingredients necessary to do our best work. Impact is the most important part: our efforts only matter if our collective efforts make a real, positive difference for the residents and broader communities we serve. Passion sustains our ability to continue the work of making an impact. People who are not passionate will likely burn out, as the work can be exhausting. Avoiding burnout helps the organization sustain itself by avoiding destabilizing turnover.

And it is critical that HumanGood teams consist of people who bring a variety of perspectives to the table. Our work is riddled with difficult decision making, and the best decision making requires testing assumptions, pushing back on a group’s current understanding of a problem, and exploring a range of solutions. If everyone at the table comes from similar backgrounds and perspectives, discussions won’t uncover as many important considerations.