Growth Without the Chaos: A CFO’s Roadmap for Housing Authorities to Scale Smarter

As a CFO, I have learned that “growth” is only exciting when it comes with a plan that your finance team can actually defend, and your operations team can actually deliver.

In the public housing world, the stakes are even higher because demand keeps climbing while resources stay tight.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reported a record 22.4 million renter households were cost burdened in 2022, meaning they paid more than 30 percent of income toward housing. That reality shows up in every waiting list and every call your front desk fields. A strategic growth roadmap is how you respond to that pressure without accidentally creating a bigger, messier version of today’s problems.

A growth roadmap, at least the kind I trust, starts with clarity and math. First, define what “growth” means for your agency in plain language: more families served, stronger unit conditions, faster lease ups, improved vendor performance, better compliance, or some combination. Then build the CFO-friendly backbone: a three to five year model that connects goals to staffing, systems, procurement capacity, and cash flow timing. I like to anchor this with a short list of operational KPIs and financial guardrails, such as days to execute contracts, encumbrance accuracy, change order frequency, and audit findings trending down. If the roadmap does not specify who owns each initiative, what it costs, what it saves, and how success is measured, it is not a roadmap. It is a wish list with nicer formatting.

Next comes market analysis, and for housing authorities, “new markets” is not just geography. It is programs, funding streams, partnerships, and service models. It can mean expanding voucher utilization strategies, exploring project-based vouchers, rethinking procurement categories, consolidating vendor pools, or partnering with nearby agencies for shared services. HUD has long documented that housing authorities administer millions of Housing Choice Vouchers and manage public housing at significant scale nationwide, so even small efficiency gains compound quickly when applied across high-volume processes like inspections, rent reasonableness, and contracting. A solid market assessment asks three questions: Where is demand rising, where do we have a realistic operational advantage, and what risks will auditors and boards care about most?

Then you assess scalability opportunities, which is a polite way of asking, “What will break first if we grow?” In my experience, it is usually one of three things: procurement throughput, finance workflows, or data quality. Scalability is not only a technology conversation, it is also standard operating procedures, templates, delegated authority, vendor management, and staff capacity planning. If your team is heroic every month-end close, growth will just make you heroic and exhausted. If your procurement process is already slow, growth will turn slow into stalled. The goal is repeatable execution, meaning the tenth contract or the hundredth recertification runs smoother than the first, not harder. A CFO’s job here is to push for investments that reduce friction, shorten cycle times, and lower compliance risk, because those are the levers that make expansion sustainable.

This is exactly where Procuris Consulting has been effective with public housing authorities. We have helped agencies translate big goals into practical roadmaps, pressure test “new market” opportunities against real operating constraints, and build scalable back-office and vendor management practices that support growth instead of sabotaging it. In plain terms, we help leadership teams align finance, procurement, and operations so growth does not turn into a permanent fire drill. Procuris Consulting is actively looking to partner with additional housing authorities that want to serve more families, strengthen management controls, and modernize how work flows across departments. If your agency is feeling the tension between rising need and limited capacity, that is not a failure, it is a signal. With the right roadmap and a clear scalability plan, you can grow with confidence, and still sleep the night before the audit.