Riaz Taplin

Founder & CEO at Riaz Capital

Speaker

Riaz leads Riaz Capital, a workforce housing developer and asset management company with a core team of over thirty professionals who manage a portfolio of over 1,500 existing units and over 3,300 residences in the pipeline. Riaz is a board member of the Oakland Promise, the urban planning think tank SPUR, and the American India Foundation. He earned a B.A. in Economic History from the London School of Economics.
Riaz has been thinking about workforce housing for most of his professional life. After growing up in a real estate family, Riaz detoured early in his career from the family business to develop his own style by founding a design / build firm and developing over 50 ultra-luxury residences in the Bay Area. Riaz then refocused his vision toward workforce housing in Oakland. Over the next decade, Riaz built a portfolio of over 1,500 units in the workforce housing category. In the process, Riaz consistently worked to innovate market-rate approaches to workforce housing, also known as naturally occurring affordable housing. In successive projects and ventures, Riaz explored co-living, adaptive reuse micro-units, student housing, and traditional ground-up construction, all of which led to the firm’s custom workforce housing solution: the Micro-Living Studio.