Millennium Monroe
89 units · Spokane
Anchored at the entry to the Monroe walking district, sited deliberately at the corridor's 2019 road-diet conversion from four lanes to two.
The Firm
Two principals.
A combined record
worth taking seriously.
Courage Housing is led by two practitioners whose careers, between them, span sovereign-scale commercial diplomacy, the founding and stewardship of a $1.5 billion health-equity endowment, and the development of housing in markets the conventional industry will not enter.
Practice At A Glance
- Founded
- 2023
- First Engagements
- Spokane, Washington
- Credentials
- Stanford Law · Oxford
Principal & Co-Founder
Antony Chiang
JD, Stanford Law School
Philanthropic Capital · Health Equity · Urban Development
A career structured around moving capital toward the people the market has overlooked.
Antony is Principal and co-founder of Courage Housing. He served previously as Founding CEO of Dogwood Health Trust, the $1.5 billion endowment created from the conversion of Mission Health in Western North Carolina, where he built the institution from a blank balance sheet into one of the largest health-equity foundations in the American South. Earlier, as Founding President of Empire Health Foundation, he stewarded roughly $70 million in annual grantmaking. He has founded three social enterprises, including LiteracyPro Systems and Altrue/Biotrue, deploying data and technology to reach populations the conventional service economy did not.
His real estate work, executed through Millennium Northwest, has helped catalyze the walkable urbanism for which Spokane has become regionally known, siting buildings deliberately at the corners where pedestrian infrastructure is being remade, so the architecture and the streetscape reinforce one another. He holds a JD from Stanford Law School.
His other affiliations have included a Vice Presidency at TechSoup Global, where he administered $2.4 billion in technology donations to global NGOs, and board service at Grantmakers in Health and Independent Sector. He is a recipient of the HUD Secretary's Award for Public-Philanthropic Partnership and a longtime volunteer literacy tutor. He spends his off hours in pursuit of unusually good coffee.
Selected Development Work · Millennium Northwest
Millennium by Kendall Yards
Spokane · 2021
Delivered returns in year one despite a difficult build process. Three years on, outperforming budget.
North Hill at Garland
Spokane · Garland District
Modern infill that reads as continuous with the district's existing architectural rhythm, a discipline most infill projects abandon.
Millennium Northwest is a Washington-based development firm specializing in mixed-use and multifamily buildings that catalyze walkable neighborhoods, with an explicit commitment to workforce, refugee, and immigrant housing.
Impact Capital · Fund Architecture · Pre-Development
Twenty years spent designing capital for the populations and problems the market refuses to engage.
Robert is Managing Director and co-founder of Courage Housing. Before founding the firm with Antony in 2023, he spent two decades at the front end of mission-driven finance: as Executive Director of Accelerating Market-driven Partnerships, the State Department initiative launched by Secretary Clinton with the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Aspen Institute, where he facilitated technical assistance on a $2.1 billion urban infill program in São Paulo; as co-founder and General Partner of Health Gap Ventures, an impact venture fund targeting digital health and diagnostics for the populations American medicine has historically underserved; and as Director of Impact Investments at Catalyst of San Diego, where he built the Women's Empowerment Loan Fund in partnership with the International Rescue Committee, CDFIs, commercial banks, CRA investors, and community foundations.
The thread across these roles is the one that runs through Courage Housing today: assembling capital from sources that do not naturally speak to one another, on behalf of constituencies the conventional market has decided are too difficult, too risky, or too small to bother with. He has done the work in São Paulo, Madagascar, and the high-poverty census tracts of California. He has done it for refugee entrepreneurs, women business owners, smallholder farmers in Central America, and now for the populations Courage Housing serves.
He holds an MSc from the University of Oxford and a BA from Reed College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed captain. He works in French, with conversational Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. An Eagle Scout who now serves on the board of review for Boy Scout Troop 506, he hosts the occasional port-and-chocolate tasting for friends and colleagues.
A Note on the Partnership
Two careers shaped by the same observation: the deals that matter most are the ones the industry won't touch.
Antony came to this work from philanthropy, law, and the practical discipline of moving real buildings through real cities. Robert came from twenty years of designing capital architecture for the populations and problems the conventional market refuses to engage: refugee entrepreneurs, women business owners, smallholder farmers, urban infill in São Paulo, women's health innovation in California. The two partners had been operating in adjacent orbits for years before founding Courage Housing in 2023.
The firm does not chase volume. We take a small number of engagements each year, each chosen because the project, the population, the site, or the structure demanded something the conventional industry was unwilling to provide. The work is unglamorous. The standards are not.
If your project requires both disciplines,
we should talk.
Write to us about your site, your population, and what you intend to build.