Michael Ross

Who is Michael Ross

Michael Ross is an Austin investor whose whole career sits at the seam between public policy and private capital. He went to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in the eighties, and he has been working in New Markets Tax Credits since the program was barely two years old.

He was a founding partner of the community development practice at Baker Tilly, the accounting and advisory firm, where the work covered affordable housing, energy, historic rehabilitation and tax credit finance. In 2009 that practice spun out into its own business, and the lending operation he now runs came out of that.

What a New Markets Tax Credit actually is

Worth explaining plainly, because the name tells you nothing. A grocery store, a clinic or a manufacturer wants to build in a low-income area. The numbers do not work, so a normal bank passes. The federal government offers investors a tax credit for putting money into that deal anyway, which closes the gap and gets the thing built.

Somebody has to sit in the middle of that: find the deals, structure them so they satisfy the Treasury, raise the investor capital, and then service the loans for years afterward. That is his job. He has also built the loan servicing platform that administers more than $3 billion of these loans, which is the unglamorous back half of the work and the reason the front half keeps functioning.

What he runs

Five Points Community Capital is a certified community development financial institution, which means the Treasury has vetted it to do this specific work. In 2022 alone it put $31.7 million to work behind 44 borrowers across eleven states, partnering with a dozen other community lenders to do it. He is chief investment officer and manages the entity.

Alongside it sits Five Points Strategic Advisors, the consulting side, which helps manufacturers and developers work through site selection and the incentive packages that come with putting a facility in one place rather than another. Same underlying expertise pointed at a different customer: knowing which public money is available, and what you have to do to actually get it.

Why the room cares

Most of the capital conversation in a founder room is venture money or a line of credit. He represents a third thing that almost nobody in the room knows exists: money that is available specifically because a project is somewhere difficult, and that gets cheaper the more good it does.

If you are building something physical, in a place that needs it, he is the person who can tell you in five minutes whether there is federal money sitting on the table you never knew to ask about.