Watch: Q&A with Oswaldo Acosta, CEO, City First Enterprises

Oswaldo Acosta, CEO of City First Enterprises, reflects on how climate finance is entering a new phase—one defined less by abundant federal resources to a leaner, more disciplined market, built for efficiency, and long-term resilience. Drawing on more than a decade in community lending, Acosta explains why this moment requires CDFIs and green lenders to rethink how they grow, deploy capital, and lead through uncertainty.

Catch up on the highlights below and watch the full interview here.

On the kind of projects City First Enterprises finances:

“A typical transaction for us is an affordable housing structure with 200 and 250 residents that needs millions of dollars to either retrofit their existing infrastructure or they need to put solar on the rooftop… In the long term, that investment will translate into savings.”

On how the climate finance landscape has shifted:

“I think that the environment or the nature of the business has fundamentally changed, and it changed abruptly… in the last 12 months. We are now at the beginning of the new normal. It’s a new super cycle for institutions like ours, and green banks, and other climate finance lenders working in the intersection of economic development and clean energy.

“Before 2025… the world was abundant. We had an infinite amount of resources to execute our vision to do rapid and effective and equitable transition to the green economy. Billions of dollars were flowing into the sectors. It was a frenzy into executing and executing fast and being as effective as possible. Organizations, think tanks, academic departments, and policymakers, and local and federal politicians, everybody was aligned more or less… In concurrence with that, we had corporate America behind the movement.

“Corporate leaders and organizations in general, including philanthropy, grew very wary of being perceived as too close to what the CDFIs and clean energy finance, and climate finance groups were doing, and how they were preserved in their approach.

“On the other hand, we had a microeconomic condition that changed more slowly, but it still  had a significant impact in the business, which is the price of money, the liquidity in the market. And then there were other externalities around this, which was  a set of local and regional incentives for clean energy projects that are no longer there… So it is a fundamentally new environment for the climate finance.”

On what the sector is facing now:

“We need to adapt to a world where there are simply not enough subsidies for us to continue growing at the pace we were expecting, and we need to change the way we do business.

“And by that I mean… growing into self-sustaining financial institutions… putting emphasis on being effective in deploying the capital, being efficient in the way we manage resources, managing risk, diversifying our sources of operations, lending, and investing capital. If we do the right things now, this is going to be in retrospect, a moment of restructuring and realignment in the sector. We will have a much more disciplined way of dealing with the wave. Let’s start making the transformations that we need for 10 years from now, right now.”

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