Attorney Paul Compton keeps working for affordable housing
Photo courtesy of Francis Hare.
Paul Compton has started a small law firm in Birmingham after serving as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Trump.
Although he has lived in Mountain Brook for the past few years, Paul Compton knows what it’s like to grow up in a far less affluent community.
Compton is a native of Georgiana, a small town in south Alabama — 2019 Census figures estimate just over 1,600 inhabitants, with an average household income of $29,432 — which is an increase over previous years. Seeing his neighbors in substandard housing helped put Compton on a lifelong path toward improving such inequities.
“Growing up in Butler County there is a lot of substandard housing and a lot of need,” Compton said. “I have a poster a friend gave me a number of years ago that says ‘Life’s not worth living without a home.’ And I think that at the heart of quality of life really is good, decent, safe, affordable housing.”
Perhaps the most high-profile step Compton took toward ensuring affordable housing was when he served as President Trump’s appointed General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2018 to 2020. But it was neither his first nor his last step in that direction.
Even now, after resuming his private law practice in Birmingham, Compton recently became a member of the Washington, D.C.-based Housing Advisory Council of the Bipartisan Policy Center, and also serves as outside General Counsel to the Alabama Affordable Housing Association (AHA). Compton, former state chairman of the American Bar Association Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development, heads the law firm Compton Jones Dresher, which also allows him the chance to work with banks to improve housing conditions.
“I was fortunate enough, early in my professional career, that I kind of saw where this could be a win-win-win solution for financial institutions that could invest in affordable housing, for the developers who got to ply their business and most of all for families who had a far better place to live than they otherwise would have,” he said.
A very brady beginning
Early on, Compton wanted to be an architect - inspired, he suggested, by the career of the dad on The Brady Bunch. “And then I realized, I can’t draw,” he said. So then he turned his attention to the law.
After graduating from the University of Alabama and then the University of Virginia School of Law, Compton went to work at one of Birmingham’s best known law firms, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in 1989. Eventually Compton became a partner in the firm, where he worked on housing issues, advising financial institutions about investing in affordable housing and community development projects.
Then he was tapped to join the Trump administration, where he remained for nearly three years.
Compton said he enjoyed his time working for HUD — under a Trump appointee whose public image has suffered. “It was terrific. I reported directly to Ben Carson,” Compton said. “Secretary Carson, he’s a terrific guy. He’s one of the few people I met in Washington, who had a public persona [and] his public persona and who he is, is really the same. Someone who’s thoughtful but has convictions about what he believes and really was about trying to do the right thing.”
Compton’s term as general counsel included 2020, which saw the nation reeling from the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Not only did HUD, through the Federal Housing Administration, work with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to establish moratoriums on eviction and foreclosure as the economy sank, but it also presided over a period of exceptional growth in the number of housing loans processed, Compton said.
“HUD makes more than a billion dollars in multifamily loans every month,” Compton said. “And HUD, through FHA single-family mortgages is the largest lender to minorities in the United States. …
“When the pandemic hit we went from kind of a stodgy old-fashioned government model where for the most part people had to show up in a conference room and sign a bunch of papers, to — in the span of about 2 or 3 weeks — we pushed all that out to be done remotely from wherever the lawyers lived.”
The result was that “At a time when things were in a good bit of disarray, that process kind of continued on, not only at the prior pace but actually faster,” he said.
The need for affordable housing isn’t just isolated to Alabama, or what are traditionally considered poorer states, he said. “This is an issue really, across the nation and I saw that really when I was at HUD,” he said.
In Alabama, Compton’s work with AHA allows him to positively impact the state of housing by “educating banks that investing in, lending to affordable housing is both good business and it’s good for their community. And so, that’s one side. And on the other side is educating developers, particularly in the nonprofit sector that the way to get a project done is not to go say, ‘Hey, give me $2 million and I’ll build something.” But rather it’s to present a business plan and an approach that combines and levers resources to get more done.”
“AHA is a strong advocate for really how affordable housing is economic development,” Compton said.
He said that “frankly the building of the homes themselves is economic development. It injects, every year, probably upwards of $100 million into the Alabama economy, just at the construction site.”
It really is the opportunity to do the kinds of things I like to do … I can kind of work on the projects that I like to, and that really is this intersection between community banks and affordable housing.
-Paul Compton
Since leaving government, Compton continues to work at the federal level with the Housing Advisory Council, to deal with policies “that meet urgent housing needs of Americans affected by COVID-19, advance opportunities through housing, and preserve and build affordable homes,” according to a March press release about his appointment.
The housing crisis and the pandemic have implications for the future of work that could potentially impact Birmingham and its bedroom communities, Compton said.
“I think there’s going to be a pretty broad rethinking of where people have to live to work,” he said. “If we’re thoughtful about it, cities like Birmingham can be a real winner coming out of this. Whether it’s JP Morgan Chase, Google, or PriceWaterhouseCoopers, they’ve all figured out that they don’t need $60-a-square-foot Manhattan office space in order to get their work done. I would see a lot more opportunities for someone who’s working for Google to be living in Homewood.”
Returning home
When he left HUD, Compton was glad to return home to Mountain Brook, to the house he and his wife Dana moved into on Montevallo Road in 1990.
“My wife and I — we’re old fashioned. We moved into our house on Montevallo Road on New Year’s Day 1990 and the house is now 86 years old and it’s the Compton house, because we’ve lived there longer than anyone else,” he said. That’s where the Comptons raised their three children, all of them graduates of Mountain Brook schools. Their oldest daughter is director of nursing at a hospital in Ft. Worth, Texas, their son is “an aspiring real estate developer,” and their youngest daughter recently got accepted into the University of Alabama School of Law.
After living a “city life” in D.C. he said he was “delighted to be back. I’m really glad that I did it, but I’m really glad to be back. It’s the old story: until you’ve been away from home, you don’t necessarily appreciate all the good things,” he said.
When he returned to Birmingham, he founded his new smaller law firm, which is located near Pepper Place.
“I spent 29 years at Bradley Arant and have a lot of fond memories and good friends there,” he said. But the smaller firm has distinct advantages. “It really is the opportunity to do the kinds of things I like to do … I can kind of work on the projects that I like to, and that really is this intersection between community banks and affordable housing.”
One project to watch for: he’s working on a tax credit in Alabama that “would really spur a lot of affordable housing for not much money at all in the big scheme of things,” he said. “If I was in a big firm, I’d have to be asking people if I could go spend 100 hours doing that. I don’t have to negotiate with anybody about that.”
He also said that his firm is working on other real estate and community development work including “projects that are being supported by historic tax credits.” There are a couple of impending projects — of the caliber of the Lyric Theater and Pizitz redevelopments — that people are going to be excited about, and “will be good for the community,” he said.
Compton said projects like those are just some of the ways he has benefited by returning home. “I’m blessed,” he said. “That’s the reason I did what I did: to do things that are fun like that.”
