Articles Archives

The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program faces political pressure. It is being questioned in some circles as no longer being necessary, now that other Trump-era initiatives, such as Opportunity Zone investments, have been put in place.

The urban violence that RYSE Commons is being designed to give its young members refuge from is very real. Some of its early members have not lived to see the Richmond, CA complex completed.

The affordable housing shortage is a big issue in America, one that’s just now getting the national attention it deserves. Millions of Americans are affected, including ones who endure longer commutes, more cramped dwellings and more failing units than they otherwise would, if more decent housing were well-located.

Talk about ambitious. Nashville’s Envision Cayce project is a big, dramatic effort to transform a neighborhood by building more than 2,000 new housing units and supporting facilities like a school, a health center and a pharmacy.

As we reported in last month’s issue, technology is transforming the commercial real estate and affordable housing sectors. It’s an exciting time of innovation; however, expectations for some of the industry giants have certainly been tested after SoftBank’s recent write downs of its investments in the panelization-unicorn Katerra and co-working-unicorn WeWork.

“For the first time since we built the pyramids, we need to rethink the way we build things.” Cecil Phillips, chairman and chief executive of Atlanta, GA-based Place Properties, spoke those words at NH&RA’s Summer Institute in July, and emphasized them again when I interviewed him recently.

It’s not true that construction is the least digitized niche of the national economy. For instance, Keith Stacker told a recent meeting of top affordable housing executives, agriculture is less digitized than construction. And so is hunting.

It has been more than a century since Henry Ford figured out that the best way to produce automobiles was on assembly lines in huge factories, and now the industry is investing billions of dollars in developing technologies for autonomous vehicles.

Mobile homes have long been stigmatized in America. During my recent drive along U.S. route 460, it was easy to see why. Stretching through the heart of Appalachia—eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia—I saw along the mountain hollow highway the poorest version of this housing type.

Offsite construction is generating a lot of buzz on how it can transform affordable and workforce housing. But some are dreaming even bigger. Could OS create a totally private tax credit market, without the need for public money?

Rick Holliday and his colleagues at Factory_OS aren’t very ambitious. They just want to change the way housing is built in this country.

While reading on a recent flight back to Washington, I was really moved by two feature articles that together put into context how far we have come as a country in alleviating poverty – and how far we still have to go.