40 Influential Leaders - Steve Saltzman

Steve Saltzman
President and CEO of the NH Community Loan Fund

Steve Saltzman joined the NH Community Loan Fund as president and CEO in 2021 to continue his mission to help people live better lives. Saltzman’s career has been focused on shedding light on injustices and creating policy change for socially vulnerable people. After graduating from college in the 1980s, Saltzman documented the housing conditions in a small town in the Mississippi Delta as a journalist and then led a commercial lending team at the Self Help Credit Union. He later moved on to become CEO of the Charleston LDC, now the Climb Fund, a nonprofit headquartered in Charleston, SC that helps underserved populations access capital.

In 22 months, the Climb Fund more than doubled its portfolio while also establishing new lending sectors in affordable housing and the Latinx community. The Climb Fund also increased investments in black-owned businesses and created a loan fund specifically to serve those who employed workers from neighborhoods with the country’s highest eviction rates.

Today, Saltzman continues his work advocating for NH people in need of support. Among the issues that the NH Community Loan Fund is focused on is helping people secure mortgages for homes and pushing for community-owned manufactured home parks. “If you look at a park that is owned by an investor, private equity firm or even a state investor and then you go to one owned by the residents, it’s night and day,” Saltzman says, citing infrastructure differences reflected in landscaping and “all the things that make a neighborhood a community instead of just a place where a bunch of homes are for rent.”

The problem, Saltzman says, is many private equity firms have come into NH and bought parks at exorbitant prices. “And what they know is that they can raise the rent several hundred dollars a month if they want to,” he says, explaining the parks are most often populated by seniors and first-time homeowners. “You know, people who work for fire departments and police departments. These people essentially get gentrified out because absentee landlords will jack up the rents and they have to sell their homes to people that are wealthier.”

Saltzman also serves on several boards focused on food system justice and climate resiliency, including Fresh Future Farm, a nationally acclaimed urban farm and grocery in Charleston, SC and the University of NH’s Carsey School of Social Impact.