The City University of New York is in the process of selecting a new chancellor. The longer it takes, the more challenging it will be for its next leader to address a critical issue: CUNY’s aging building stock. This is no small undertaking. The city’s public universities have 24 campuses and more than 300 buildings with an average age exceeding 50. Some date back more than a century.

Repairing old CUNY facilities is difficult enough, but developing new ones can be excruciatingly slow. Because of the demand for major projects and the phasing of capital by the state, CUNY’s development processes can take up to 10 years. But a solution for new construction is hidden in plain sight.

For more than three decades, the city-based organization I run has used a unique nonprofit public-private partnership model to develop 3.5 million square feet of social infrastructure including campus facilities across the country—pretty much everywhere but our home town.

One reason our approach hasn’t been used here might simply be a lack of awareness that it exists. But it also might be related to a deep skepticism that public-private partnerships can benefit the public and not just private interests.

Here is how this P3 model works: Our nonprofit joins with the academic institution in a standalone partnership that has the authority to issue tax- exempt bonds to finance the project. The partnership hires a design-development team that assumes construction risk, with incentives to build on time and on budget. Once the building is complete, the institutional client (a CUNY college, in this case) enters into a long-term lease. When all debt is retired, ownership of the asset is transferred to the institutional client at no cost.

In short, the model combines low-cost financing with efficient design-build delivery. Everybody wins.

CUNY’s most recent capital report—which outlines its five-year, $6.7 billion capital plan—highlights the need to use more public-private partnerships by “monetizing” CUNY’s real estate assets. But a nonprofit model provides a more scalable approach and stretches capital dollars much further.

Not all academic buildings can be monetized, but they can all be developed with low-cost financing combined with grants, tax credits and other economic-development resources. This would free up direct capital allocations from the city and state to repair existing facilities.

This isn’t just about laying bricks, but building the city’s 21st-century workforce. The importance of CUNY to the success of New York as a place of opportunity and equity is unparalleled, according to CollegeNET’s Social Mobility Index, which tracks how well economically disadvantaged students move up the income ladder after graduating. Three years in a row, CUNY’s Baruch College led the nation, with Brooklyn College and Queens College in the top 10. CUNY has most of its campuses in the top 100—more than any other system of higher education.

Although those results were achieved despite CUNY’s outmoded facilities, this is not sustainable. With support from the CUNY board of trustees, the next chancellor could demonstrate the effectiveness of a nonprofit P3 model by cutting the ribbon on a new academic building in two years, not 10.

At a time when social mobility has stagnated around the country, CUNY’s students, faculty and staff need and deserve quality facilities now more than ever. To attract them, the system must embrace a better way to build.

Daniel Marsh is the president and CEO of NDC, a community and economic development nonprofit founded in New York City in 1969 to increase the flow of capital to underserved communities.