Blueprint Archives

In the years of my youth, air travel was an occasion. The men dressed in suits and ties, the women in dresses, good meals were served with the elegance of a four-star restaurant and the rows of seats were comfortable.

As you begin to peruse this issue it will, at last, be April and a winter of cold and darkness in many regions of the country should be behind us. I have been commuting both to and from work in the darkness for so long now I sometimes wonder if I’m in Iceland rather than Washington, DC.

Early in my career, when I worked as a sportswriter, Sonny Werblin, then the head of Madison Square Garden and thus the boss of the Knicks and Rangers, said to me, “A budget is a strategy.”

Rather than providing, we seem to find ourselves in an era of taking away—and predominantly from those who need it most. Health insurance, Medicaid expansion, the right to remain here, access to birth control, endeavors to slow climate change, overall affordability.

In order to get our editorial and design staff home for the holidays, we are putting this issue to bed a week before the leaders of both houses of Congress ascertain they will vote on tax change.

As we reach our deadline for this issue, the two houses of Congress are playing ping pong with our tax code. If those on the House side of the table win, the New Markets Tax Credit may not survive. If those on the Senate side win, it may survive. And then again, either side can change its mind.

The majority of our issues of Tax Credit Advisor are built around themes. In those months we try to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end on subjects, such as housing and healthcare, asset management or one of the tax credits.

I walked outside the Santa Lucia train station in Venice, boarded the vaparetto (or water bus) down the Grand Canal and found myself surrounded by palaces and churches, some five and six centuries old. Suddenly transported into hundreds of years of history, the short-term view no longer seemed as significant nor as inspiring as the long-term perspective.

In our office, in addition to publishing Tax Credit Advisor, we manage organizations that address the needs of aging Americans. This has inspired me to be a collector of stories about creative aging solutions, including many in housing. Some of my favorites—including MetaHousing’s Arts Colonies, senior housing that contains art studios, music studios and theaters, and the Actors Fund residences where people get to spend later life with others with whom they shared an occupation—have been covered previously in these pages.

Working in various businesses for almost five decades now, perhaps the most significant change I have seen is the dependence upon data.

“Longevity is going to change everything,” says Kathryn Lawler, executive director of the Atlanta Regional Collective for Health Improvement and one of the most popular presenters on the aging conference circuit.

I grew up in a suburban community of 18,000 in which the homes were built on potato fields and mostly bought with the help of the G.I. Bill. Walking to school, I would say hello to the local firemen who were playing handball against the wall of the firehouse. When the cops were called by neighbors to break up a backyard party that got too loud, we knew them by name.